When the word wants to be a thing

but I'll use it anyway. Just as I needed to use every finger and the machine arm to hold down the paper in its various folds in order to retain/capture the words I'd made, so is meaning ever elusive; and once you do think you've nailed it down, it is subject to interpretation after interpretation, many of which are just wrong. I struggle to get words to do what I want, both in the paper, and in my own speech and writng.

That said, the thing I hate about metaphors in papers, I'll call them academic metaphors, ("this symbolizes this, etc.") is that they're often a false attempt at being poetic. Poetic just *is*, it's not b/c we happen to put two unlike things next to each other and draw a comparison. I think the poetic comes out organically. If you force it, it's obvious.