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Insomnia and poetry
I may have put this poem in my journal before, but it seems to bear repeating this morning.
At 3 a.m. the sky is black, black.
Heavy with riddle-me.
Acid roils and boils and
My stomach prods my heart.
At 4 a.m. the sky is indigo.
Improbable dye lot.
I go from front to back to side to front
And weave the blankets into knots.
At 5 a.m. the sky is cobalt.
Thickly sticky from the tube.
I play and replay movies
Of things that have not happened.
At 6 a.m. the sky is periwinkle.
The mist spins its own reels.
I curl away from the clock
And listen for the minutes.
At 7 a.m. the sky is just blue.
I must walk into the day
Without flinching.
I got out of bed at 5:30 this morning. I had gotten into bed at 2 a.m. It is now nearly 6 a.m. and the coffee is ready. Outside it is dark and wet. After twenty minutes, my eyes still will not quite focus on the screen. But they will, given two cups and forty minutes. I know. I've been here before.
I have had problems sleeping for as long as I can remember. I don't remember a lot of my childhood, but I do know that sleep never came easy, even then. I couldn't sleep then because I had a lot of energy and was excitable. My mother didn't care if I actually fell asleep; she just wanted me in bed ... so I did most of my thinking and idea-hatching and scheming while lying there, waiting until I felt tired enough to sleep.
Later this began to work against me. Having learned the habit too well, I now find that as I lie in bed, my brain revs - at exactly the time it should be slowing to a halt. I am often tired, these days, but my mind seldom wants to stop. So I have to trick my body into making it stop.
Meditation and masturbation are reliable standbys. They are just about the only tools I have. Drinking or drugging myself into a stupor is the easy method, but that sets dangerous precedent. I could easily seeing myself needing a few stiff drinks every night just to fall asleep, so I have consciously avoided that road. I feel guilty even when I have a head cold and take Nyquil or something stronger to knock myself out. It's as if I'm cheating.
It doesn't help that the same mind which is reluctant to fall asleep is the mind which is often reluctant to get into bed in the first place. Ever since I've been old enough to basically go to bed whenever I want, my sleep hours have been irregular. It's caused problems with jobs and occasionally relationships. I often cannot depend on my body to be tired at the "right" times or for my brain to recognize the cues that it is.
(On the other hand, wearing my contacts makes me feel tired after a couple of hours staring at a computer, because they irritate my eyes a bit, and my brain apparently thinks "sore eyes" is the number-one "I need sleep" signal. I'll come home from work and remove my contacts and magically get my second wind.)
As I commented once, I seldom go to bed feeling tired, and I seldom get out of bed feeling awake. That's a rotten system, but I don't seem to be able to change it much. I am also known to say that I have only gotten out of bed feeling good about five times since I was sixteen. Generally I wake up feeling like unholy hell.
As I say, I've been like this for a long time. I have unpublished copyrights on two collections of poetry. These collections will never actually see the light of day; in fact, they don't exist in their original formats anymore, unless you somehow manage to dig the file copy out of the Library of Congress - which you probably don't want to do; I was young and stupid and the poetry is mostly very bad. (It was useful practice in dealing with copyright, though.)
The first of those collections is called 3 a.m. That title, and the poetry therein, mostly dates back to high school. A great deal of the poetry has to do with sleepless nights, and the thoughts one has on those nights. The oldest one I have kept has been retitled since then.
NOTE RECEIVED FROM AN INSOMNIAC
Sleep
Must be a very valuable thing indeed
Because I find myself
Fighting so very hard
To gain it
Insomnia has been what you might call my poetic muse. Most of my best poems, and a lot of very bad poems, have been written because of it. I can't write fiction when I'm suffering insomnia; in that sort of bleary half-awake state, I can't concentrate well enough for prose, but writing down the clouds wandering through my brain is actually easier. (I don't say all those clouds are worth reading.)
Besides, I never can remember all the wonderful story ideas that caused me to have trouble getting to sleep in the first place. These days I just get up and write them down, part of the new mentality that if I'm not sleeping, I might as well get something done - the mentality that has me at the keyboard drinking coffee right now, instead of lying in bed trying to squeeze out another two hours of slumber. I don't know whether this is ultimately a helpful or detrimental plan.
The hacker ethos - where you don't want to leave a code job until the puzzle's been solved, no matter how many hours awake that requires - has gotten me into trouble over the years as well. The following was written after attempting to sleep on an office carpet because when I finished the job I was too tired to drive home:
WHILE YOU WERE OUT
I slept in the empty room on the left
down the hall
past the cobweb storeroom
past hope
half past three in the morning
I was gone but I couldn't quite rest
And when you came in
the carpet had bled onto my shoulders
where I rolled
and there were track marks in my eyes
It is now 6:25 and I am nearly finished with my first cup of coffee and my eyes are mostly focused, although they will ache all day. I'll go to work and get things done, but I will probably also leave early and go home to sleep. I don't have a problem with that, and my bosses don't either, thank god.
In a perfect world I would work whenever I wanted to and sleep whenever I wanted to. I've approached this a few times. There was a brief period where I was able to completely abandon the clock, letting my body find its own rhythm. I generally ended up working for about four hours in the late afternoon, and for another four or five from about eleven p.m. into the wee hours. This worked great for me. If it wasn't for all the other humans I have to interact with, I'd be seeking out a schedule like that right now.
REFLECTION
In hours just before the dawn
These are the thoughts I dwell upon:
Foolish feuds that I've incited,
My love affairs quite unrequited,
Plans which will never coalesce,
Maunscripts cobwebbed on my desk,
Embarrassing errors unbelievable,
and the clutches of Accounts Receivable -
These are the thoughts I dwell upon
As I lie on my back awaiting dawn.
It looks like it's going to stay gray and rainy all day. That suits me fine. I think I'll go have my second cup of coffee.
© Columbine
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