Morning. Filtered light through partially drawn curtains. Dust motes dancing; prismed colours playing games across her bare floor.

Warren pushed a stray strand of wayward hair from her red-rimed eyes as perpetual, perennial oscitantism nailed her to the thin mattress.

Collapsed into her bed, fully dressed, after another tough night at the Barrel ‘o Nothing Bar. She possessed the uncanny tendency to catch hold of the sycrentist, lost in his absinthe, scowling with a scruffy beard, roundish glasses perched low upon a once broken nose. Ranting on reform – the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system.

Usually, she brought him home, in his thin coat and scarf wrapped around his vulnerability.  Home to her tiny attic rooms, to let his anger and misaligned rhetoric wash over her, like his stale breath and probing fingers.

Ah, but last night, she discovered vertebra could line up like an iron spike. She left her Lenin, her Gramsci, her Trotsky, mumbling of things frenetic and unreal. To sleep alone, no lesson in anarchy or proletariat sex.

Just enough coal to heat water to wash and make tea. Another blessed day; her stack of Votes for Women pamphlets piled on the table. Oh, not that male anarchy or fraternalism. Bread and roses. Freedom through sisterhood and then revolution from within.

She could, would, sleep alone until her rhetoric was the loudest.

for mlmm wordle # 180

12 wordle words in italics

definitions: oscitant ((adj.) yawning, as with drowsiness; gaping. drowsy or inattentive, dull, lazy, negligent,  malaise; syncretism ((n.) the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion.)

*hegemony:” Antonio Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie in Gramsci’s view develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “common sense” values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.” Wikipedia And, one of the folks I studied in grad school.