WHAT’S AN 8-LETTER WORD FOR SWISS CHEESE OF THE BRAIN?

My friend Muri’s National Poetry Month challenge is winding down.  For more information, click on this link:  https://murisopsis.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/looking-at-nonce-forms-for-npm/ .  My muse has had her knickers in a knot over this American Sentence prompt.  She likes writing sentences but apparently, not ones that are exactly seventeen syllables.  Everything she gave me had to be lengthened or shortened, as if I was some kind of sentence tailor.  The flag never appeared, so my patriotic bonus went out the window.

I had no clue what subject deserved such painstaking attention.  I tried fashioning hysterically complex coffee bar orders into sentences, but seventeen syllables barely covered the basics:  which item, which size, hot or iced, flavors, what kind of milk, etc.  Iced café latte grande made with almond milk and two pumps of vanilla, for instance, is nineteen syllables.  And pretty ordinary.  Whenever I am stumped and feeling like a failure as a writer, I open a new document in Word and start a letter to my sister—the one person who believes in me and treasures every word that comes from my keyboard, no matter how pedestrian.  In this space, a sentence can end abruptly or hijack a whole paragraph.  I sit searching for words more than I used to.  They were once readily accessible; now they play hide-and-seek in my gray matter and my neural circuitry must go all round the mulberry bush trying to find them.  Technology, for all its faults, has been a huge help.  If I plug a similar word into the built-in thesaurus, or Google whatever bizarre clue my brain spits out, I often luck out and the word I want appears.

BRAIN-FARTS

It used to just aggravate me when I couldn’t remember a word.
Now, I worry it’s the beginning of…   …   that disease old people get.
The Swiss cheese brain disease you can ward off by doing crossword puzzles.
Or those…   …   Japanese-sounding number grid thingies my dad used to do.
You can’t just park yourself by the TV and watch Judge Judy all day.
Do that, you’ll end up in a…   …   place where dessert is always green Jell-O.
Roundabout, the paths my gray matter follows when a word goes missing.
And yet, your gray matter figures it out, deftly filling in the gaps.