When I was a kid, way before the Internet,
a whatchamacallet was something
it took me over a year to get.

Too timid to reveal my total ignorance,
I, like all the younger kids,
mostly stood to the side, nodded,
waited for some other clue to figure out
what the older brothers were talking about.

A whatchamacallet. Right.
A fancy five syllable word. Pretty rare.
It takes an entire breath to say it.

And since nobody knew what it was,
much less, what it was called,
you know, whatchamacallet
you could get by, by looking like
you knew what was what.

I stayed covert until it became clear
none of us knew what anyone meant
which hardly mattered,
so long as no one did anything to bring the moms out.

We knew so little about anything
the little we did know applied to everything.
You could say anything. Everyone nodded.

Whatchamacallet eventually disappeared for lack use.
Replaced by names and things you cannot see or smell or point at.
That luminous world which once held
our dreams of things to come,
had passed.