brain fart

a blank mind sets in &
though it may only be for a
flash of a second,
the words you are really trying
to muster,
dangle like a doughnut on the end of
a stick in front of a policeman
waiting next to the turnstile of your
subway stop,
waiting to give you a ticket for
littering
(fill that quota at the bookends of
the month then run to get that jelly)---
you reach out in your head,
trying to grab it,
as if you had dropped your pencil
and were floating to grasp it again
while waiting for takeoff in a zero-
gravity
space shuttle, set for commercial
flights---
your lips start to move to make the
sounds but the linkages aren’t
synched up just right & you
babble out some sub-freudian slip
that in its best translation can’t
even be construed as your native
language,
so in frustrated despair you
slap your brain across the face
inside your skull while trying to
teeter-totter on that conversation
tight rope &
making the best of your pounding,
paradiddling,
parapraxis,
you spit out some nonsensical
factoid that basically gets ignored
anyway.