The night is only a sort of carbon paper, <br />Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars <br />Letting in the light, peephole after peephole . . . <br />A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. <br />Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus <br />He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness <br />Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions. <br /> <br />Over and over the old, granular movie <br />Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days <br />Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams, <br />Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful, <br />A garden of buggy rose that made him cry. <br />His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks. <br />Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars. <br /> <br />He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue . . . <br />How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening! <br />Those sugary planets whose influence won for him <br />A life baptized in no-life for a while, <br />And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby. <br />Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods. <br />Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good. <br /> <br />His head is a little interior of grey mirrors. <br />Each gesture flees immediately down an alley <br />Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance <br />Drains like water out the hole at the far end. <br />He lives without privacy in a lidless room, <br />The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open <br />On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations. <br /> <br />Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats <br />Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments. <br />Already he can feel daylight, his white disease, <br />Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions. <br />The city is a map of cheerful twitters now, <br />And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank, <br />Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/insomniac-2/
