Insomnia is usually pictured as a failure to switch off: the racing thoughts, the clock, the ceiling. Dave Bonta's twelve lines skip all of that and treat wakefulness as a natural event, like a seed splitting open in the dark. The speaker begins already "dead again," and that "again" turns sleep into a nightly rehearsal of dying. The skull fills with soil, and what follows reads less like a nightmare than a small piece of ecology. A mammal moves in, leaves an acorn, and the acorn germinates.
The central idea sits in the couplet "which awakens / and can't go back." It works on two levels. An acorn that has sprouted cannot return to being a dormant seed, and a sleeper who has woken in the night cannot simply retrieve sleep. The poem lets one fact stand for the other. Insomnia is not an absence of rest here but a presence, something growing. The mind is no longer a private room. It is a habitat that other life passes through and takes root in.
The poem's construction is spare. It is six unrhymed couplets with no capitals and no punctuation apart from the apostrophe in "can't." The short lines make each image arrive alone, and the absence of full stops lets the sentences slide into one another, so that "leaves an acorn behind / in the brain case" flows straight into "which awakens." The enjambment helps the wording too. "Behind" means what the mammal left, but it also puts the acorn at the back of the head, and "brain case" is a flat, anatomical phrase that makes the skull sound like a container waiting to be filled. The pronoun "which" is slightly ambiguous as well. It most likely points to the acorn, but it could be read as pointing to the brain case or the mind itself, and the poem does not push us to choose.
The sound of the language supports the sense. "Skull fills with soil" is full of liquid l sounds, as if the words were being poured. "A small busy mammal" is quick and fussy, and the word "briefly" in "briefly inhabits it" makes the animal a short-term tenant, indifferent to what it moves through. Then the vocabulary changes. "Feelers root / for the teeming light" gives the roots the language of antennae, so the plant seems to be sensing its way. "Root for" also carries a pun, since it can mean to search and to cheer on. There is a strange pull in the phrase "teeming light." Teeming is a word for crowds and swarms of living things, and here it describes light, as though brightness itself were alive. Roots are normally drawn downward, yet these seek light inside a closed skull, which suggests a longing for illumination that has nowhere to go. That is a fair image for lying awake at night.
The grammar breaks down at the end. Up to "feelers root," each couplet has a clear verb: fills, inhabits, leaves, awakens. The last couplet, "mycelia for neurons / no eye but an owl," has no verb at all. The sentences become fragments, as if syntax were being decomposed along with the brain. "Mycelia for neurons" is the poem's boldest exchange. The fungal threads that run through soil take the place of the nerve network, so thinking is not ended but replaced by a slower, underground kind of connection.
The final line is the hardest to pin down. The owl is the creature of the night, the one animal that is awake when the speaker would like to be asleep, and it is also a traditional emblem of watchfulness. "No eye but an owl" seems to say that the only seeing left belongs to the bird, so the speaker's own sight has been handed over to something outside. Reading "eye" as a faint echo of "I" is tempting, and the line does allow it, though that is an interpretation rather than something the text insists on.
What gives the poem its force is that it refuses the usual tone of complaint. Nothing in it is anxious or self-pitying, and the strangeness is delivered in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. By imagining the sleepless head as soil, shelter and seedbed, it makes a private misery into part of a larger cycle of growth and decay, and it leaves the reader unsure whether that is comforting or horrifying.