From the Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Edition © 2123:
ghost word [ɡōst wərd] n. a word in a dictionary or another collection of words that is not a real word and is usually there because of a mistake1
phantomnation [ˈfantəmˈnāSHən] n. 1. Also known as ectolinguistics; the study or attempt at reproduction of the language of ghosts 2. (archaic) Appearance of a phantom; illusion. A ghost word resulting from an erroneous reproduction of Alexander Pope’s 1725 translation of The Odyssey2
The great poems of the 21st century were written in absence. A new ancient language with a script something like the hypothetical bits of blank notebook left splattered white with potential around “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” if a Stater bullet had gleaned it from Yeats’ teeming brain before his pen could.
The absence of the train is still the train, air whistling into un-air the way glaciers are sea rushing into un-sea. So the ghost where a word on a page on a book of poems on a life disappeared into un-word became the new medium. Entropy the oldest ghost story, finally understood as such by a poetics despairing understanding in an era when information displaced truth. Truth whistled in behind the caboose but by that point you were plastered to the locomotive.
In those days, love was defined as the absence of love unmarked. Attendance spotless. Gothic logic that something you could absent from loved you because it kept a checkbox next to your name with its mouth open begging for ink, for you to show up in that invisible way, fill the white space’ s howl. Meanwhile, ghosts spoke in drop-outs in names unrolled, uncalled for. Sound waves that shivered up the bell curve and back into the clapper. Speakers that oozed themselves through the woofer rather than utter another untruth. Boxes whited open, spilling silence.
Like the old ghost words, the new undead language was first found floating through dictionaries as rare copying errors, reminders that although language clones cleaner than violence or genetics, nothing reproduces perfectly. But unlike the old ghost words, the new un-words endured. Unheard of! The unwritten masterpieces of gutter cleaners, sidewalk snugglers, failed sprinters, abstract chemists, old locals, shamed poets, blind birdwatchers, tweakers, phosphorus gulpers, satirical cartographers, shoplifters, astronomers of despair became subtext which became text which became the new untext.
The language of absence remains untranslatable. But in the way it haunts our eyes when we look away some of us have come to understand:
1 A living term that only exists because of the lives of dead words.
2 “These solemn vows and holy offerings paid/To all the phantomnations of the dead.”