Draft

An Incubus


slipped into the bedroom well after

her catatonic blundering left

the thumbturn haphazardly horizontal, and

she, drained by drunken key-search fumbling,

left her wide yawn last to close

on the night. With the clanging noises

to gain entry blunting the edges of all

other sounds—the whine of hardwood

panels under pressure as they strain

against the nails that hold them

down—her ears are turned to inward

silencing.


Hypnogogia is off for the night, subdued

to the shadows by flesh-bone-blood—

no need to creep around the body out cold

and dreamless, stealth lost on the piss-drunk

girl, still vacuum-sealed in bar-sweaty

spandex.

She stirred, mumbled.

Still again, the intruder, treading the fine line

of grey-out amnesiac security, pushed

shadows from eyelashes across her

cheekbones like ink stains her mascara

made the morning after.

The sun slunk

in through hang-over inertia, and blistering

recollections leaked pus onto her pillow

as she sat up, the sleep-sand deserting

her eyes. The fragments reassembled

into a limbo somewhere between

dream and memory.

An incubus

came to bed last night.



^^ not a true ending. plus the indentations are all fucked as well as the linebreaks... yeah...

Modernification of Words

Word History: The lowly kiosk where newspapers are sold or advertisements are posted is like a child in a fairy tale raised by humble parents but descended from kings. The word kiosk was originally taken into English from Turkish, in which its source köşk meant "pavilion." The open structures referred to by the Turkish word were used as summerhouses in Turkey and Persia. The first recorded use of kiosk in English (1625) refers to these Middle Eastern pavilions, which Europeans imitated in their own gardens and parks. In France and Belgium, where the Turkish word had also been borrowed, their word kiosque was applied to something lower on the scale, structures resembling these pavilions but used as places to sell newspapers or as bandstands. England borrowed this lowly structure from France and reborrowed the word, which is first recorded in 1865 with reference to a place where newspapers are sold.
- Dictionary.com

In our day and age, it seems like language is probably the aspect of life most taken for granted, next to family, central heating, and grocery stores. The evolution of language is an absolutely fascinating phenomenon: what words are appropriated into new forms, what words are (like google), how (and which) words make their way into the languages of other cultures but still retain the basic sound from their origin...

These are interesting things that the average person completely takes for granted. Another example, pointed out by a wonderfully blazed individual, was the cleverness of "Cheez-Its" which verbed a whole subcategory of dairy products as a marketing strategy that makes you feel active while you're eating a processed snack with high salt content.

Or take, "conversate," a word that pretends toward more formal language, but has actually made its way into the dictionary as slang, an appropriation of conversation instead of using plain old "converse" (which is already more formal than it would be to say "We talked" or "We spoke").

Who makes these rules? How many times does a word need to be spoken for it gain enough prestige to enter anything from Dictionary.com to Merriam-Webster? And when that word is entered, how does one definitively decide its spelling? How does this affect communication between generations?

special languages

we imbibe special languages,
all lost in the sauce, pseudonyms
and nick names align morphemes
into sonic synchrony, as a chorus
of frequencies coalesce in fractions
of consonants and vowels the angle
between an "a" and an "o" as in a whistle
mouth-made just for your best friend
who gets all of your pillow talk since your
peers pickled like preserved pork rinds
in the blistering surface of your cerebrum's
unforgiving neural loops as they rewind
over and over and over until there are only
levels of nonesense to engorge your staunch
second stomach. man, you will eat away
and never fill.

man, you incredible creature, fit with an art so sublime,
and yet you convolute its processes with the onslaught of time.