The 10th Brick From the Bottom

Home is a brick-red structure
With a black entrance and exit.
A blackness that’s noted on the first
And last day of the month
And all those in between.
By which, I mean,
If leaving or entering
There’s no way around it.

With equal regularity
I have ignored the tenth
Brick from the bottom.
Though both door and brick
share the same seniority.

These musings are a preamble
To the following query:
Which word or words go unheeded
By each of us daily?
Then one day,
Out-of-the-blue, it is needed.

In a leisurely way we
Fish around becoming increasingly
Frantic when we fail to hoist
It from a memory
Turned murky and dense.

Our heartbeat increases
We become tense, unused
As we are, to grasping for
Words like a stranger, confused.

That happened for me
Yesterday when I noticed my
Whatchamacallit was showing.
For all my efforts, I could not
Call it to mind.

Some 10 hours later, as
I was getting ready to unwind
It flitted into my active
Memory bank - “strap”
Was the word I had been
Unable to find. My bra-strap
Had slipped from under
My shoulder pad.

The trauma of handling something
Whose nomenclature I could
Not remember
Prompts me to pay attention,
Hereinafter, to the banal little words we banish
And only call them into service
When at our most selfish.