Because I Never Learned the Name for Books

XD Thank you for the praise.

[A note as a mod: try not to say nsfw things in anything but in an actual work cuz even if the work is marked high, the reviews are visible elsewhere, so they wouldn't be]

I actually really love the Jabberwocky poem, but I wasn't using it as an inspiration. This was a challenge for NaPo, so I was reading and re-reading the challenge poem example to come up with this.

You can find that here: A Poet's Universe

Thank you for letting me know it feels unfinished and incomplete. I'll see if I can try to resolve that.

Hello!

Actually those are the made up words for the challenge. Bonfikify, Torsugine, Koronobite and Raggabon are all words that I created for this poem in an effort to follow a prompt.

As for sheer, I can't really say I used it in the right context, no, but I wanted to give the feeling of something unobstructed and rough, so I used sheer.

I did the same thing with thud. I wanted that feeling of deep, like, book pounding sound, the one you get when you bat on a heavy paperback or hard cover, so I stuffed thud in between two words that exemplify book to help get the whole scene/feel together.

Gutter is actually completely in the right context however. There is such thing as a gutter in a book which is the area of the page which is lost to the fold of the book. Basically what I'm saying in that first line is that "'they' [books/content/themes/etc] are the lost space of my thick book."

I completely understand why this is confusing, and I'm actually surprised so many people liked it. Honestly, all I was really going for was the feeling of words and the sounds.

For the words I made up, I went with longer syllables and I combined sounds that usually mean different things. For instance bonfikify is sort of like bon-fire, a friendly gathering sort of thing, but 'fikify' is tough to say, so it's a conjunction of something friendly, but difficult. Plus fikify is fun to say, even if it is something of a challenge.

Torsugine is sort of like torment torture tortoise etc, and since in this case it's a noun, tortoise type creature which has sanguine mashed onto it, which is a color scheme sort of thing, old, auburn/amber, or optimistically naive.

Korobonite I wanted people to think of kryptonite, especially given the context of "x is the only weakness to y" so hopefully that one isn't too hard. But also a lot of made up elements and things end with nite because of chemical naming, so I stuffed nite on it.

raggabond is a play on vagabond which is a vagrant or a homeless person.

All in all, the poem is just really about how stories can take you from one world to another in a flash of nothing at all. You pick up a romance, and suddenly you're in an action novel, you pick a mystery, and you're running through the streets a pauper.

To do a stanza summary of the point, I would say this:

The story is lost in the thickest books, but you can still enjoy them

As I read a mystery, I'm marred by the story's characters

In a hard cover mystery, the killer is a Japanese fantasy creature with an otherworldly nature

If we want a romance, the only penetration is a made up substance which can expound in spurts unsatisfactorily

I change into the characters I read, I feel their pain, and their suffering, the labels people put on them, I change into the antagonists too

I have to read to get rid of those sorrows even though I'm mature enough to have worked through these things myself and I can spot the flaws

Greek Mythological Beast of gross nature[insult], stop tormenting the antagonists. I just want to put the books down for a while and live my life.

I hope having a bit of a guide for how I interpret the words can help you see what I was going for.

Hello!

So I actually went over a few of the words for the reviewer one up if you want to take a look ^^

Mostly, I just went with words that sounded like words I wanted to use, but limited myself away from. For instance, languify to me is a long and liquid type of verb. Doing something extendedly. A lot of it just had to do with sound though, like bonfikify.

For me, I used a word that I wanted it to sound like, so if you can figure out what the word is similar to, such as bitterworth = bittersweet and raggabond = vagabond [which I actually used later in the poem too] you're good to go.

Given that the challenge was to create a mishmash of real words and fake ones, I really am very happy that so many people liked this! Thank you for your kind words and I'll definitely check out the punctuation. You're right, it does look a little scarce.