Note Taking

Chemical words bubble out of your mouth

Jumping, leaping, floating free.

I see electronegativity, I hear all eight syllables.

I watch your lips form the perfect shape

To let them slip stealthily through.

Polyatomic ions fill the room, in every corner

Piling up, spinning around my head,

Buzzing and nagging, no; these are acids.

Hydrochloric and hydrofluoric

Spitting their sounds in my ears.

Too many, too fast, I’m suffocating.

I can’t understand anymore. The words

Fill my head, packing themselves in,

Phosphate, Car-bon-ate

Storing syllables and extra suffixes;

I’m about to explode, but

Combustion requires a hydrocarbon.

I’ll write faster and faster,

Pencil incinerating paper yet

Your words run joyfully in circles,

At the speed of light

Cleverly eluding my memory.