Playing with words

Sometimes – when I’m walking or showering or folding the laundry – a phrase begins to rotate in my head. Subconsciously, words pull into an almost sentence and play three-card monte. Punctuation joins the party; commas insert themselves while periods delete. Verbs disappear to create powerful auditory punches. Ellipses and em dashes decide the pauses. When it pops into my awareness, I repeat it and play with it some more until I can write it down and use it to spin off a paragraph or two. Short essays, small thoughts, some alliterative fragments. It’s my favorite way to play.