Insomnia always knocks like an unexpected poem, even though we already knew it was going to come.
Yet another poem on insomnia. Accompanied with a small essay.
I already know
I have to write a poem before going to sleep.
Why a poem? You ask.
And I tell you — because I don’t know
why the apprehensions of a quality-time
before sleep, tends
to evade me by the end
of the evening.
The evening has not ended
yet, and the knock-knock
of a feral animal called insomnia
has begun to put me into sleep —
a make-believe, very confusing
empty sleep
with the qualities of the moon.
Insomnia always knocks
like an unexpected poem even
though we already knew
it was going to come.
As I said in one of my earlier poems, Insomnia is my bed partner:
Emile Cioran, the famous romanian philosopher of philosophical pessimism and Existentialism says, “Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.” He is not far from the truth. Whereas Leonard Cohen, the canadian folk soft rock songwriter/singer, says, “The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
We tend to choose one of them depending on our moods. When we are suffering from insomnia, we will choose Cioran. And when we have ‘temporarily’ come out of it, we might choose Cohen. Cohen is more pragmatic in this case. Cioran is more truthful. And if we read their two quotes in succession, as in — -
“Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture. The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
… we come indirectly to accept a kind of Satanism. We call ourselves Satan, the fallen angel, who had to call himself superior, because (perhaps he was and), he was thrown into a place of torture by the God, who preferred sleeping angels around him, sleepwalking through his orders.
