Insomnia is usually something that happens to us. We lie awake, watch the dark, and resent it. Dave Bonta's "Sleepless" turns that around in nine words. The title names the condition, and the three lines that follow describe what the condition is like from the inside: not a failure to sleep, but a way of paying attention. Wakefulness becomes a form of openness to the world.
The first line, "we listen," sets this up. The pronoun is plural, so the night is shared, and the poem gives no sign of any other company. Listening is also an act, not a passive state. Bonta could have written "we hear" and left the noises to arrive on their own, but "listen" makes the sleeplessness a choice. It also carries a small trick on the page: "listen" has a silent *t*, and two lines later "tent" pronounces it. The echo is visual, not audible, but the tent seems to sit inside the word the way the people sit inside the tent.
The second line, "to everything new," is the widest in the poem, and "everything" is the biggest word in it. Bonta names no sounds. There is no owl, no wind, no snapping twig, so the reader has to supply them, and whatever you imagine is probably right. "New" suggests unfamiliarity: these are sounds nobody in the tent can identify yet. It also suggests that the night itself is newly made, that sight is gone and hearing has to build the world from scratch. Because there is no punctuation, "new" can also lean into the next line. "New / tent" is a possible reading, a shelter as unfamiliar as the noises it fails to keep out. The line break leaves that ambiguity unresolved, and the poem is better for it.
The last line, "tent in the woods," drops the article. It reads like a caption under a photograph, and that creates a quiet shift in perspective. The poem begins inside the listening "we," then ends by pulling back to see the tent from outside, a small shape among trees. A tent is the thinnest kind of room. A wall of fabric marks out a human space but lets in every rustle, so it suits a poem about attention. The poem also ends on "woods," the largest and most surrounding thing it mentions, and there is no full stop to close it. The night, like the sentence, simply continues.
The sound of the poem is as hushed as its subject. Almost every consonant is soft: *l*, *n*, *w*, *s*, with the *t* of "tent" the one firm click. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the line lengths do some work. They run roughly three syllables, five, then four, with the stresses falling something like *we LIS-ten / to EV-ry-thing NEW / TENT in the WOODS*. The middle line swells to hold the vast word "everything," then the last line shrinks back to something concrete and nameable. The compression and the juxtaposition of an inner act with an outer scene recall haiku, though the poem doesn't follow that form strictly. The lowercase and missing punctuation add to the effect. The poem seems to be whispered so as not to wake anyone.
What makes it worth reading is how much it trusts its reader. The title works almost as a fourth line, supplying the situation that the rest never states. The poem also never says whether the sleeplessness is pleasant or anxious. The word "new" tilts it toward curiosity, but the tent's thin walls leave some unease in the air. A reader can hold both. The poem also makes a quiet argument about what a poem can be: it doesn't explain the night but gives you a place to sit inside it and listen, which is hard to do while thinking about sleep. Try reading it aloud at barely above a whisper and you may find the poem's pace is also the pace of the listening it describes.