I never know if it’s just me.  Can’t quite work out if it’s just my mind that plays this way.  But I pick out words.  Phrases.  Thoughts.  And I retain them for years.  Sometimes they’re my own words, sometimes they’re the words of others. You’d think this would come in handy in certain situations.  Like if I were on Jeopardy, I had someone constantly quoting movie lines at me or if ‘Name That Tune’ made a big comeback.  But sadly it doesn’t really work that way.  The phrases, the words… they play over and over in my mind as do tunes and the cadence with which things are said, but I can’t always recall the source.

Unless they’re mine.

Then I know who said them, but still can seldom recall the piece they came from.  Today has seen one piece from a poem repeating in my head.

the way I’ve written
about the gray in between

I wish I could remember the rest of it.  The context.  I wish I could recall the rest of my poem.  I wish I had a better storage system for my decades of poetry than It’s in one of those folders or that black note book.  But that’s where they live.  On those stray papers and in my mind.  In ink and paper when all my other thoughts get recorded and bits and bytes.