Insomnia: A Soliloquy
The inane convulsions of an unquiet mind
The jolt — again — into thought-tangles exposed wires, galvanized. Insomnia’s definition — always a dangling jeopardy off the jagged end of an unruly digit on the clock-face. Never neat like the strike of midnight, or precisely poetic like three a.m. Always the crunch and grind like gravel under your mind 2:39. 3:21. 4:17. A number not easily noted or divided or folded away like the fresh bed-linen that you were too tired from no sleep the night before to change. So you toss, in the d.n.a of your own inertia and wake flailing on the sharp edge of seventeen minutes after four in the morning. Indignant glare of time’s declaration of war against you, screaming in eerie green, insinuates room was peaceful before you burst in. Clock wants you back under so it can continue its relentless dictation of time passing, dying, uninterrupted.
Floundering — bed full of non-biodegradable mental landfill, detritus of long-gone serenity; radioactive anxieties toxic with unbankable half-lives. Alone, but grasping — and there’s nothing you want to grab hold of. Contamination happens anyway. Your toss and turn, a futile horizontal attempt to run in a small square paddock of trumped-up foam and cunning metal coils. Miles to go before I sleep*. Never the slow-motion bliss, the glamourized glide of head to a pillow of placations, stuffed with botox like the smile of airbrushed sleeping beauties in a well-paid lie. I can’t change the channel. My nights resist the thirty-second scripts of sponsored dreams.
My head’s composing manic poetry. Lines of verse scrawled on the ceiling — merging into a Dali landscape, always dripping away, dribbling over the margins of finality. Compulsive enjambment of my narrative syntax in one raucous unending poem. Each line spilling over the edge of certainty, taking me with it, of what should be the last word, never recognizing where or when a thing should end. Blurred resolutions are my solution when I can’t just walk away, be done with an idea, a love, a moment. Am I addicted to ambiguity? My answer looms in the doorway, ghost of an absent father now dead — who only said I love you when drunk. Who held your hand till it hurt, who didn’t feel the fragility of your bones — or did, and squeezed hard, anyway.
Late nights let perspective and pronouns slip and slide in the dark. The universal becomes personal or is it the other way around? My story. Lines crossed out, crossed over. Boundaries. Mine, dripping like blood in a crime-scene. The senseless spatter of unforeseen consequences may never be solved. They morph into the need for more time, more space. Is that why, when I write, I’m blind-drunk on semi-colons? Craving the pregnant pause, but I fear what it gives birth to. Defects of my reasoning, curled like the dead foetus of a comma under the unblinking eye of endings. Full stops. Why are they full? Aren’t endings so often empty?
Sleepus Interruptus. My bastard Latin translation for the inane convulsions of an unquiet mind. Sleeping in badly-spliced segues.
Risk a glance at my opponent — my square-faced sentinel. My night-watchman, marking nocturnal passing. 4:59. Feel the silent slice of time’s guillotine, beheading another sleepless hour. Hear its thud on the floor, dread its blind grimace, as it rolls under the bed to join the others, gathering dust.
Just another haunting in my witching-hour.
© Melissa Coffey 2021
- Quote is from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost
Melissa Coffey is a Melbourne-based writer, editor, poet & performer. She is fascinated with the place where words emerge from our most visceral of experiences. Her short stories, creative essays and poetry are published in numerous international and Australian anthologies (sometimes incognito).
Thanks to J.D. Harms for his Prompt that brought out my surrealist side: “consciousness-in-stream”.
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