Sonnet to Insomnia

It starts out dark. When rosy-fingered Dawn,
her nails still glinting chipped “Asphyxia”
by Urban Decay, scratches blackboard-down,
I’ve lost another night: Insomnia,
my songstress, whom I’m trying to adore,
cacophony of birds and garbage trucks,
the hungry cat who scratches at my door,
in your firm grip I wriggle but stay stuck.

So rather than bemoan my sleeplessness,
I celebrate with silky robes and tea:
a red-eyed yet ambitious Orpheus.
My mission’s not to find Eurydice
(whose dark dreams look to me like beauty rest)
but thumb my ink-stained nose at Morpheus.

Artist’s Statement

This poem was written in 2002, not long after I had moved from Greece back to Baltimore, dear old hometown that I loved and hated both. That spring, I seemed to be experiencing a whirlwind tour of my psyche with my Muse, who was urging me more and more to write in form. I’d spent a lifetime rebelling from form. My father was a formal poet. What young poet doesn’t need to get away from her predecessors’ influences (especially when the primary influence is both Poet and Papa)? Yet there I was, right back where I had come from, literally and literarily. And I found that I was having fun with iambic pentameter, rhymes both strict and wonky, and received and invented forms.

In spite of its flaws, this poem represented the first time I was able to incorporate several elements that had always seemed to me to be irreconcilable. The first, of course, is the form. I’d been playing with sonnets, but they were really just poems in 14 lines with some rhyme. And though I’m clearly fooling around with both Petrarchan and Shakespearean structural elements in this one, its “sonnetness” is there. Second, I love my classical allusions as much as the next gal who lived in Greece for several years, and who now lives in Rome. But I also enjoy weird pop-cultural imagery and diction, like that pinky-blue nail enamel shade that, honest to god, is called “Asphyxia.” Finally, I had fun blending subject matter that can actually be serious—insomnia and the ars poetica-type questions about the sources of creativity—with language that is both playful and sensuous.