My Passwords Are Plotting Against Me

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem takes a mundane frustration—forgotten passwords—and turns it toward something quieter and more tender, which is a genuine strength. The move from irritation to loss is where the poem finds its real subject, and the apple pie is the hinge that makes that turn possible.

That pie image is the poem's best decision. Its first appearance, "the day / I baked an apple pie for the first time," reads at first as merely one more arbitrary personal detail among birthdays and anniversaries. When it returns in the final lines—"that afternoon / we baked apple pie side by side"—the shift from "I" to "we" reframes the whole poem. What looked like trivia turns out to have carried a person in it. The repetition earns its emotional weight precisely because the first mention seemed offhand.

The central conceit could be pushed further. Words like "conspire," "plotting" (in the title), and "treacherous" gesture at the idea that the passwords are actively hostile agents, but the poem does not fully commit to that drama. The digits are described as guarding and laying open secrets, yet they never quite act with the menace the language promises. Choosing whether these strings are genuine adversaries or simply indifferent keepers of what has been forgotten would sharpen the poem. As written, the metaphor is announced more than enacted.

Some of the middle-stanza phrasing works against the poem's momentum. Lines like "yet laying open so many secrets / for others to reach" and "must speak these numbers exactly / to gain access" state the mechanics of passwords in fairly flat, expository terms. Against the specificity of the apple pie, this abstraction feels thinner. Grounding these ideas in concrete images—as the pie does—would keep the emotional temperature consistent.

The closing question is the right instinct: it opens rather than resolves. But "A sum of savings, an account" competes with the human memory that follows, and the accounting language is the less interesting of the two possibilities. Trimming the financial detail so the question lands more directly on the shared afternoon might let the ending strike harder, since that afternoon is plainly what the speaker most fears losing access to.

One small note on consistency: the title and poem move between "digits," "numbers," and "characters," when most passwords worth remembering are a mix. If the numerical framing is deliberate—tying the passwords to dates and thus to memory—leaning into that fully would help; if not, a single consistent term would tighten the imagery.

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amazing poem I have to say as I am getting older so is my memory I struggle with all dates numbers  etc. the beauty of your poem was the blinding of technology as a tool that you can rely upon ( basically if it wasn't for my phone I don't know what I’m doing) I really bonded with your words because my father passed away from Alzheimer's and it's hereditary

sincerely your friend  trouble