Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Insomniac symphony
is playing in my brain again
I think I am going insane again
I can hear the banned trombone again
sliding back and forth like a satanic piston
I began laying awake as a teenager
I was no stranger to it, I had not come down
yet from whatever drug was still playing
in my mind, I just did not want to unwind
I was all wound up like a rubber band
in a kid's toy airplane, the first time I got high
on pot, I listened to jazz on the radio, I never
turned off that jazz radio in my head, I was awake
and I wanted to hear each note move through space
now I believe that when I decided poetry was my calling
I might as well say that insomnia is calling me to grind
my gears through all of my sleepless fears my lost tears
I'm lost in the void of tossing and turning all the words
over in my thoughts that will not quit me, I'm making
poems up in them in the middle of the night, I'm driving
down the highway of my imagination looking for a horizon
so dark out with stars blazing in my neural circuits firing
back and forth looking for a pathway to ultimate slumber
here, where time drifts along like dreams ready to take over
only the body knows the difference between them, the body
seeing itself making love to its most wild dream lover
but the insomniac jazz keeps improvising endless possibilities
the radio is on and is dialing itself from noise to signal, and back
again passing through all the stations and the outer limit fuzz
static flashing in an out of zones of zeros and infinite numbers
playing weird songs in the intervals like, papa oh mow mow
like angels singing on roof tops to all the insomniac world
like Donovan sang, the whole crazy world is taking far too much
methedrine, in the can't go to sleep world how much is too much
how little sleep is to little, in the middle of your deep hour
when more people commit suicide, and more poets are born

in the can't go to sleep world how much is too much
how little sleep is to little, in the middle of your deep hour
when more people commit suicide, and more poets are born

Brilliant. Loved the whole thing. Your insomnia's better than mine but who's keeping score anyway? If I can get some sleep tonight, I'll write about finally waking up if I happen to wake up.

maybe that's why I became a poet, I have had a sleep disorder
since I was a teenager, it got more of a problem as the years
went by.

Me too. I've been struggling with insomnia for many years, since I was teenager. Same... has gotten worse through the years. My mind goes on and on and on when I'm trying to sleep. I can't stop my mind from racing. I often have my most lucid moments in regards to writing during times when I'm sleep deprived.

Anyway, I just posted a poem titled "4am to 5am" which I wrote between 4am and 5am this morning after not having slept at all. It's here on the page.

Here's a terrific article for you, Craig... "Why Broken Sleep is a Golden Time for Creativity"

http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why- ... reativity/

I read about this recently somewhere.It gives a lot to ponder.I always thought of myself as a night owl, I'm not sure how that happened exactly.As a teenager I was very restless, and I recall not liking to get up early to go to school.I was tired a lot, maybe I was undernourished.
But I suppose a lot of other kids did not have very good diets either.I had a fairly normal childhood I guess, I was an only child, and I felt that my dad did not pay much attention to me.So I guess I became more of an introvert. As the late 60's kicked in I began drinking a lot,then pot and LSD came along and as I had thought of myself of a beatnik, if I was to put a term on it. It was not like I woke up everyday and said to myself, "I am a beatnik". At any rate
I took to pot and LSD like a fish to water. So I spent a lot of nights tripping , mostly on the weekends, but those all night sessions became my way of life. For me tripping was who I was, other kids seemed to be doing it just to party and hang out, but their lives also seemed to be mapped out. I never felt like my life was mapped out. My dad never talked to me about going to collage and what I would become, I only remember him telling me to "get a job". So I also tried taking speed on some occasions, and as speed would keep you up all night, I am not
sure how that messed with my internal biological clock. It was the freaking late 60's for fuck sake.