Seventeen words, four lines, and an entire sleepless night is somehow inside them. Dave Bonta's "Insomniac (3)" opens with a proverb turned upside down: "morning is a lie." Dawn is normally what the sleepless wait for, the proof that darkness has an end. Here it is exposed as a false promise, and the next line says why: "night will make night." The sentence is almost a tautology, night producing nothing but more of itself, and that is the point. For an insomniac, night is less a stretch of hours than a condition that renews itself, one that can survive the daylight and simply return.
The word "lie" carries a second meaning too. People lie awake, lie in bed, lie there staring at the ceiling. The poem never points this out, but the pun is available, and it lets the morning's dishonesty and the body's helpless position sit in the same syllable. Then there is "will make." It is the grammar of a forecast, delivered with the weary certainty of someone who has seen this weather before. The speaker is not worrying about the coming night. They know it.
The sound of the first couplet is blunt. Both lines run to four syllables, mostly single-syllable words, and "make night" puts two stresses side by side so the line closes like a door. Nothing is rhymed in the traditional sense, but "lie" and "night" share a long *i*, and that vowel keeps ringing through the opening. There are no capital letters and no end punctuation in these two lines, which makes them feel like something muttered rather than composed, a thought that never formally stops. The first capital letter in the poem is the "I" at the start of line three. The self arrives only after the world's promises have been dismissed.
The second couplet lengthens, and the speaker's situation widens with it. "I continue alone" uses an unglamorous verb. To continue is to go on without going anywhere, and the comma after "alone" is the poem's only internal punctuation, a small catch of breath at the admission of isolation. Then comes the line break: "head full / of." The line ends on the bare word "full," so for a moment we feel fullness before learning what the head is full of. The enjambment acts out the crowding.
The answer, "my own multitude," is the poem's richest phrase. "Multitude" is the longest word here, a Latinate, crowd-sized word that falls away over three syllables. It sets up a paradox: the speaker is alone and yet surrounded, with no other person in the room and a throng inside the skull. The poem does not say what the crowd consists of, whether worries, memories or half-finished arguments, and that restraint lets readers fill it with their own 3 a.m. voices. "Alone" and "own" also nearly echo each other, one word for isolation and one for possession. The crowd is the speaker's own, so there is no one to blame and no one to ask to leave. Whitman's famous line "I contain multitudes" treats the many selves within as a source of grandeur. Bonta's speaker contains one too, but here the abundance is something to endure.
The title, "Insomniac (3)," names a person rather than a symptom, as if sleeplessness were an identity. The number suggests this is one of several poems under that heading. That is only an inference from the title, but if it is right, the repetition suits a poem about nights that keep reproducing themselves.
What makes the poem worth reading is how closely its form follows its meaning. It is short because the speaker has no energy for more. The pairs of lines, one blunt and one trailing, mirror a mind that cannot settle. And because the last word, "multitude," resolves nothing, a reader finishing the poem can feel the pull back to line one: morning is a lie, night will make night. The poem has no way out, and that is how it conveys what insomnia is like.