The moon is usually the friendly face of a summer night, a thing for lovers and songwriters. In "Insomnia," by a writer who signs as Ghost, it behaves more like a spotlight. It "shines against the night sky / And into her room," and the phrasing sounds like trespass. The woman at the centre of the poem didn't invite the light, and she can't switch it off. In under a dozen lines the poem turns a peaceful scene into one of quiet siege.
Its subject is chronic sleeplessness, and its central idea is that this kind of suffering is both invisible and exhausting. Nothing happens in the poem. A woman lies awake and stares "blankly at the ceiling." Yet the vocabulary is violent. Her thoughts "consumed her mind in / Merciless torture," a strikingly harsh phrase for something that looks, from outside, like lying still. The mismatch is the point. The external world is soft, with "soft noises" that "flutter about," while the inner world is a place of devouring. Even the "images and pointless thoughts" are cruel because they are pointless. They aren't dramatic memories or real worries she could solve, just mental static that won't clear.
The form does a lot of the work. There is no rhyme, and the absence matters. Rhyme can work like a lullaby, closing each line with a small click of resolution, and this poem withholds that comfort. The lines also vary in length and often break at awkward moments, on small, unfinished words: "as," "in," "the," "a." Reading "She stared blankly at the ceiling as / Images and pointless thoughts / consumed her mind in / Merciless torture," we are tipped from one line to the next before a thought is complete. The syntax never settles, much like the woman. The capital letters that begin each line, even mid-sentence, reinforce this. Every line starts as though it were a fresh attempt, and none of them finishes the job of rest.
Time is handled just as restlessly. The opening is in the present tense ("shines"), then the poem slips into the past ("stared"), then reaches back across "as long as she could remember," and ends on the present wish ("She just wishes"). Whether the writer intended it or not, the effect is of a night with no clear edges, where this evening blends with a thousand earlier ones. The phrase "as long as she could remember" is quietly alarming. Insomnia has eaten into her memory of what normal nights were like, so the problem has no beginning she can point to.
The ending is the most telling part. We might expect a wish for sleep itself, but what she wants is to "sleep without the / Aid of a drug, or a / Natural suppliment." The poem's last word names a remedy rather than a rest. The ellipses that trail after "remember..." and "suppliment...." (the second with four dots) leave the sentences hanging, as though she, or the speaker, were too tired to finish. The final wish is also modest and realistic. She doesn't dream of paradise, only of unaided sleep, and the poem doesn't grant it.
What makes the poem worth reading is this plainness. The pills and supplements give it a distinctly contemporary feel, a world where sleeplessness is treated like a shopping problem, and the poem refuses to dress that up. It doesn't glamorise the night as a time for creativity or romance, and it doesn't offer a cure or a moral. It simply lets the reader sit in the room with her until the unfinished last line.
The pen name, Ghost, suits the subject, if we read it as an inference from the text. A ghost is something awake in the dark hours, present but unseen, and the woman here seems almost spectral too, watched only by the moon.