Dave Bonta's "Incubus" is six short lines long, and it leaves a house full of sleepless dread. The title is the first clue. In old folklore an incubus is a demon that settles on a sleeper's chest, and the word later came to mean any nightmare or oppressive burden. Bonta gives the demon no horns or weight. His incubus is a child, and a child that cannot say what is wrong. The poem's central idea is that fear is hardest to bear when it cannot be put into words, and that it behaves less like a monster than like a new member of the household.
The opening couplet turns on its imagery: "my head full of ink / I had no wish to draw." Ink usually promises writing or drawing, the start of a poem, but here it is a heavy, dark fullness, a head stuffed with unused material. It may call to mind a squid releasing ink when threatened, though that is my inference and the poem never says so. The verb "draw" works in more than one direction. One can draw a picture, draw water, draw breath. The speaker has the means to make something and refuses, or is unable. Already the poem is circling a problem of expression.
The second couplet changes the scene: "fear having come / to live with us." The pronoun shifts from "I" to "us," so the trouble is no longer private. The verbs are ordinary and domestic. Fear does not strike or haunt, it "comes to live," like a lodger or a relative who stays far longer than planned. The phrase "having come" also suggests the arrival is already over and cannot be undone. Nobody is shown deciding to let fear in.
The final couplet gives fear a face: "as a child troubled all night / that could not speak." The grammar is deliberately loose, and that looseness is where much of the meaning sits. "Troubled" could describe the child's own distress, or it could mean the child is troubling the household, keeping everyone awake. Both readings fit, and they merge into one picture of a house where no one sleeps. The relative clause "that could not speak" attaches most naturally to the child, but it also seems to spill backward onto fear itself. A frightened infant cries because it has no words for what it feels. The adults, in turn, can only listen and fail to understand.
That muteness links the end of the poem back to its beginning. The speaker has ink but "no wish to draw." The child has distress but cannot "speak." The poem closes on that word, and the silence it names is shared by both figures. Nothing in the text explains why the speaker refuses to write, but the structure invites us to see the refusal and the child's helplessness as the same condition. The poem is about fear, and it is also about what happens to language when fear is in the room.
The form carries this out. There are three unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, so nothing marks where one thought ends. The lines are short, about four to six syllables, except the long, trailing "as a child troubled all night," which stretches out like the night it describes. The syntax is unfinished too. Only "I had no wish to draw" is a complete clause, and the rest is a chain of hanging phrases. Fear is never described in a full sentence of its own, as if the poem could not quite close its grasp on it. Soft, repeated sounds ("come," "child," "could" with their hard c, and the long vowels of "night" and "speak") give the reading a low, lulling pulse, like rocking a child who will not settle.
The poem is significant because of what it declines to do. It does not explain the fear, name its cause, or offer comfort. Instead, in about twenty words, it makes an old supernatural figure feel domestic and recognizable, and it lets the reader hear the quiet of a house where something is wrong and no one can say what.