Everyone has lost a thought halfway through saying it, and Reuben's "Forgot" turns that small embarrassment into a seven-line experiment. The speaker starts by describing memory failing, then actually fails, and the poem ends at the moment it loses its own point. Its subject is forgetting, but its real claim is made through construction rather than statement: forgetting is slippery enough to undermine anyone who tries to talk about it.
The first two lines are almost mathematical. "I remembered forgetting, / Then forgot that I'd remembered." One contains the other: a remembering that holds a forgetting, then a forgetting that swallows the remembering. Both lines end on a soft, unstressed syllable (-ting, -bered), which gives the opening a gentle, rocking rhythm, as if the speaker is still in control. The paradox sounds like logic, but it already hides a trap. To remember forgetting, you must have noticed a gap, and noticing is exactly what the second line erases. Each layer of memory is removed by the next.
Order begins to crack in line three. "I forget how many things I forgot to remember" is the longest line, and it is a tongue-twister, with forget, forgot and remember tangled into one breath. The tense slips too. Until now the speaker has narrated in the past, but "I forget" arrives in the present, as though the forgetting is happening while we read. The vague word "things" matters as well. The poem never says what was forgotten: no names, faces or places. Concrete imagery is almost entirely missing, and that absence becomes the poem's most telling picture, a cupboard being counted by someone who can't remember what was put in it.
Then the grammar goes. Lines four and five, "Forgot how to remember, / Forgot how to forget...", lose their subject. The "I" that anchored every earlier line has dropped out, leaving bare verbs, as if the speaker's self is wearing away along with the memory. The ellipsis after "forget" makes the trailing-off visible on the page. "Forgot how to forget" is a neat piece of nonsense, since forgetting is the one thing nobody has to learn, yet it carries a faint chill. A mind that can neither keep nor release things has lost control of both. The parallel phrasing, "how to remember" and "how to forget," treats the two opposites identically until they stop feeling like opposites.
Next comes the turn. "Where was I going with this?" is plain spoken English, the line people say when a story has wandered off. It is the only question in the poem, and it breaks the frame, because the speaker is now talking about the poem itself. The verb "going" quietly makes the poem a journey, and the journey has no destination. After the fragments, the casual tone brings relief, and it is the funniest moment.
Then the ending: "I forgot." It is the shortest line, two beats, and it repeats the title, so the poem loops back to where it began. There is no end rhyme anywhere. Instead the poem rhymes by repetition, with "forgot" and "remembered" returning like a stuck record. That echo is ironic, since a poem about forgetting is built from words so insistently repeated that they are hard to forget.
What makes "Forgot" worth reading is that form and content cannot be separated. Rather than describe losing the thread, the poem loses it in front of us, shifting from tidy parallels to a tangle, then to missing subjects, and finally to a shrug. It can be read as a light joke about everyday absent-mindedness, or as something more unsettling about a mind slipping its moorings, and the text supports both readings without choosing. There is one last paradox as well. Whoever shaped these lines had to hold on to the idea long enough to finish it, so the poem about forgetting is also, quietly, proof of something remembered.