Tag: Sleepless

Poetry Blog: Fragment

I’m returning to familiar territory with this poem; sleeplessness. It’s something I suffer with every once in a while, so it’s not a terrible problem, but it can leave me feeling absolutely exhausted for a few days. As a result, I often find myself somewhere between a zombie and a purely functional human being, particularly at work.

This was a poem I believe was written a few months back. In fact, to begin with it wasn’t a complete poem as it was a kind of ‘something’ that I found on the bottom half of a page in my notebook , sat beneath a different, finished poem. I didn’t even notice it when I went back to write the other up for another blog as it just looked like 10 lines worth of notes. Thankfully, I found it again when flicking through the same notebook a few weeks ago. Once I’d given it a read I decided that I’d have to sit back down and get it finished.

I have a vague memory of finishing the poem at the top of the page and deciding to head back to bed. However, before I’d gotten up out of the chair another few lines arrived in my head and I sat back down to see what I could put together. I imagine it was another half an hour before I headed back upstairs. Anyway, it turned into the poem below.

The sounds of your sleeping collide with that of the pulse echoing around my head in the otherwise silent room. Awake again.
It prompts me to move, eventually, sleepily, stumbling out of the room.
On the landing I freeze at movement in an adjacent room
as someone stirs.
Trying not to wake them, I imagine their panic and confusion in a darkened room, perhaps abruptly departing a dream
and still myself for a moment while they return once more to their slumber.
Toes curled over the edge of every stair, I descend cautiously, robotically
before brutally puncturing the silence with electronic noise and light
as I disable the alarm, listening for a stretched out moment
before silently opening a door to pad across the pitch black front room.
The irony is not lost on me as my eyes refuse to wake fully,
my vision comfortably blurred around the edges as I finally sit
and wonder what to do now.

I like to take myself off downstairs when I can’t sleep. First and foremost it means that I’ve got less chance of waking of the rest of the family. One of the main reasons for getting out of bed in the first place is so that I don’t wake my wife. The other reason is that I enjoy the silence of the downstairs of the house. Eventually I’ll settle at the dining room table either to get some ideas down in a notebook – if it’s ideas for writing or lines for a potential poem that have woken me. And this was what happened here.

I called the poem ‘Fragments’ for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because that’s what it was when I found it; just fragments of an idea. Lines scribbled down underneath a completed poem like I’d just had enough and wanted to just get some sleep. I also called it fragments as a reference to my sleep at these types of times. Sleep is fragmented when I’m like this. I’ll usually sleep for a little bit and then wake up, unable to get back to it. It’s then that I find myself getting up. Even when I eventually head back to bed I often can’t sleep and will wake up regularly when I do.

As usual I’d love to read any comments about the poem. I hope you enjoyed it.

Poetry Blog: Pain

At the risk of repeating myself, this is yet another poem that was borne out of a sleepless(ish) night. I’d found myself clambering out of bed not long after midnight as I couldn’t get to sleep because of the pain in my shoulder and arm after I’d damaged a nerve during a coaching session when I should have known better than to take on goalkeeping duties. I’m 49 for goodness sakes!

So I went downstairs with my book as I find reading takes my mind off things while also never failing to make me feel sleepy, whatever else might be going on

It amazes me how many times it happens that my mind is full of ideas and potential lines from a poem at these times. But it happened again, so I began writing, ending up with two poems; one about making the decision to get out of bed in the middle of the night and this one, about the pain that I was suffering with. 

Pain

The voice that tells you not to speak,
the constant nagging doubt,
a sleeping partner tracking your every move,
a shaft of moonlight in a 4am garden giving the illusion of movement,
the urge to run from something unnamed that might not even be there,
a telephone staring intently as you ponder the call you don't want to make, paralysed,
a strangled scream,
a fruitless sneeze,
the date that teeters on your horizon, pulsing ever so slightly,
the message you should have sent,
an unvoiced opinion,
the stinging comeback stopped in its triumphant tracks by a tongue bitten,
the memory that refuses to ever truly leave.

With this poem I just found myself thinking of things that I’d compare pain to and once there were a couple of ideas written down it became a kind of stream of consciousness.

In daylight hours, on next read it became an exercise in editing; sorting the wheat from the chaff so to speak and getting rid of ideas that jarred with others or just anything that reeked of the nonsense that might sound great in the sleepless early hours of the morning. There was also a little bit of repetition where ideas were a little too similar for my liking. I guess that comes with writing when you’re so tired! Thus, this became a relatively short poem.

I hope it translates well enough. I hope there are comparisons in there that you can identify with and that you might recognise as being familiar in terms of being in pain.

As ever, I hope that you enjoyed the poem. It’s always nice to read comments too, so feel free to leave one as I genuinely appreciate the interaction.

Poetry Blog: Imagine…

This was a poem that was almost forgotten. It was only a nagging feeling that I’d written two at the same time that led me to scour through a notebook to find it.

It’s another poem ‘inspired’ by not being able to sleep. As a teacher, I usually find that at some point in my summer holidays there’ll be a period of sleeplessness; probably a few nights in a row where I’ll get out of bed having not been able to sleep and sit downstairs or in our bathroom reading, wide awake for a good few hours.

This poem was written with another (see link below) a short while before we broke up for summer. I had a lot on my mind and having got up and written one poem, I found myself thinking about ways of getting to sleep. We were in the midst of a heat wave – in the UK we call it a heat wave whenever the temperature gets around 18 degrees or more – and it occurred to me that I could go and sit in the garden, despite the fact that it was around 1am. Maybe that would help me to sleep? However, as someone who sleeps naked, I’d gotten out of bed sans clothing and I thought it better to protect any late night curtain twitchers or unassuming neighbours with prying eyes. This skinny, hairy Geordie is not a naked sight for sore eyes. More a sight to make your eyes sore. Or make them burn.

Poetry Blog: Awake

Anyway, I found myself imagining heading outside, in the nip, as they say. Here’s the resulting poem.

Imagine...

Imagine the shock of the chill night air against your skin,
the delightful uncertainty of worn concrete
on the souls of your feet, the sharp, silent stabbing pain
of a stepped on pebble, invisible in the moonlight
and the sheer relief as you sit in the damp, three week long grass.
Sleep won't come so you take a risk, leave the house,
not far this time, but sure of the knowledge that this place 
is yours alone, yet fully conscious of unseen terrors,
alert to every noise, perturbed at the possibilities,
yet aware that this was the final door to walk through.
Imagine sitting in the grass, legs out beneath you,
succumbing to a ridiculous sleep and waking maybe hours 
or even just minutes later, the sky slightly lighter
and slipping back to bed while no one knows
about the risk you've taken, about the barrier broken 
and the possibility of more.

Reading this back, it seems very much the product of a tired mind. It feels like a strange idea, but then again sleep deprivation can make people think and act in a strange way. I remember having the idea to go outside. Where we live is very quiet and so the only risk would be from wildlife (cats and insects mainly) and maybe if I’d been clothed I might have ventured out. In the end, having the idea and writing the poems that I wrote that night led me to sleep anyway.

Having read the poem back I’m very aware that I spelt ‘soles’ as ‘souls’. Now at the time of writing the actual poem, this was deliberate. However, looking back, I can’t quite put my finger on what I was aiming for with that line. I think it was that being out in the fresh night air would be good for my soul and so I was playing around with the idea of bare feet and their soles and the benefits to my ‘troubled’ mind at that time. However, I can’t remember specifically what was troubling me – at this point in time it could be one of a lot of things, as it’s not been a very kind last 9 months or so.

Regardless of seeing the poem as a little odd and not being able to fully remember some of the ideas behind it, this is one I’m actually pleased with. In short, I like the imagination behind it and the narrative aspect to it. I like the idea that it’s something I might well think about doing, but am very unlikely to actually go through with, however tame it may seem to some. Writing about it and creating something from it is the next best thing.

I hope you like the poem. Sorry about the unimaginative title (no pun intended). It’s something that I’m not getting any better at! Anyway, feel free to leave a comment as I always enjoy reading them.