elusive shadows

i desperately try to imagine intelligent words ebbing through the complicated valleys, curious crevices, and intricate waterways of my mind.
i want to know they are there.
i often find myself seeing “it,” the perfect, the unattainable; the word that slowly vanishes, blows away, disappears in a cloud of smoke and mirrors; a parlor trick of the mind.
it’s all downhill from there…
time and a few thousand brain cells will be sacrificed in my attempt to recreate what was only a premonition, the silhouette of a word i never really knew; a shallow grave, a glimpse of a ghost.
futility is unkind.
i can only hope, for this is the only comfort i dare afford myself, that one day, perhaps a day much like today, this perfect nebulous word reappears to illuminate my soul;
giving me for one moment, a reason to speak.