Counting sheep is supposed to carry you toward sleep, but the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Insomniac (2)" gets no further than "one." The poem is five lines long and records a small defeat that turns into a small strategy. A mind that cannot be forced quiet is invited to stop fighting and watch its own nonsense.
It opens with a battle: "At war with the bed / and the scenes and company and everything / else in my mind." The bed, which should be a place of rest, is an enemy. The grammar is just as odd, because the bed sits in the same list as things that exist only in the head. Physical furniture and mental clutter are lumped together as opponents, which is how insomnia feels at three in the morning, when the room and the thoughts blur into one hostile territory. The second line piles up its items with repeated "and"s, and the sentence sprawls and then spills over the line break into "else in my mind." Like the thoughts it describes, it refuses to stop in a tidy place.
The word choices are worth a second look, because "scenes," "company" and, later, "farce" all come from the theatre. "Scenes" suggests replayed episodes from the day or from memory, and "company" works both as people the speaker has been with and as a troupe of actors. By the last line the reader realises the speaker has been describing a stage the whole time. The mind at night is a theatre that won't close, running its performance for an audience of one who badly wants to leave. Even the word "farce" fits this, since it names a kind of comedy built on chaos and bad timing. (It also comes from an old word for stuffing, which suits a head crammed with scenes, though the poem doesn't push that point.)
The turn comes with "I count to one." After the long, tangled sentence, the main clause arrives almost as an anticlimax. The grammar makes the speaker wait through the whole battle before announcing a gesture so modest it is nearly a joke. Counting is the traditional cure for sleeplessness, and here it stalls on the first number. Yet "one" also means singleness, a single self set against the crowd of scenes and company, so the line reads as both failure and a tiny attempt at focus.
The last two lines change the poem's mood. "Here:" works like a stage direction or a hand pointing at the present moment, and the colon sets up an instruction the speaker gives to himself: "be nothing / but the farce." The line break lets "be nothing" stand alone for a moment as a command to disappear, before "but the farce" qualifies it. The speaker may be told to become nothing except the absurd show, or to be a mere spectator of it. Either way, the war ends not with victory but with a change of attitude. The mind's chaos is reclassified from enemy to entertainment.
That shift is carried by sound and numbers as well as sense. "War" gives way to "farce," so tragedy deflates into comedy in the space of five lines. "One" and "nothing" share the same vowel sound, which quietly links them, and the poem moves from one toward nothing the way a countdown would, as if the real count were running backward toward sleep. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The free verse, with its long line followed by short ones, mimics a mind that sprawls and then, briefly, shrinks to a point.
The poem's significance lies in this economy. It doesn't describe insomnia at length or promise a cure. It captures one useful thought: that the harder you fight a restless mind, the more it performs, and that laughing at the performance may be the only way to quiet it. The numeral in the title hints that it belongs to a set of poems on the subject, but it works alone, in a few lines that end by turning exhaustion into a dry kind of humour.