Poem A Day: Awake

Awake

Stars splashed across the vaulted sky,

I stare unsteadily overhead

reaching for sleep with all my might.

It doesn't come.

Patterns flicker across my eyelids

intermingled with words that dance

through the broken branches of my thoughts.

Boredom stops up my brain

and my concentration stops on the paper.

It stares blankly up at me.

I stare blankly back.

I've counted the stars fourteen times tonight

and every time I came up with a different number.

The clock blinks its red-eyed gaze at four a.m.

and my head pounds with pent-up thought:

dances no one will ever see,

songs no one will ever sing,

emotions I might never feel again.

I've written seventy novels here in my head;

Friends I've never met but know better than myself,

terrors that lurk for me in the shadows the moon won't reach.

I am a great insomniac.

I can do anything when sleep doesn't come.

So save me the Nobel prize

and when I accept,

I'll thank the moon and the stars and the damned clock

for keeping me company so many nights,

and then I'll thank you

for keeping me awake.

In my teenage years and my twenties, I suffered periodically from bouts of insomnia. (Teaching and adulting have since cured me.) I wrote this poem one of those long, long nights when I worried that the rest of my life would be spent in a fog of confusion that no amount of coffee could ever cure. I guess I just had too much to worry about.