Insomnia is usually described as an absence of sleep, but in Logan Brosemer's "Night thoughts" it feels more like an overcrowded room. The speaker lies awake while the mind plays a loop of noise, old memories and imagined arguments. The central idea is that words left unsaid don't disappear. They wait until the lights go out, and not knowing how someone else feels only feeds them.
The first stanza shows how the mind falls apart under this pressure. It begins with a "never ending tumble of sounds," a phrase that suggests clothes in a dryer, something going round and round with no one to stop it. The list that follows stretches across time: "a long forgotten memory" belongs to the past, while "a conversation still to be had" belongs to the future. The speaker is trapped between the two. Then the tone turns violent. The imagined versions of the conversation are "smashing the inside of my skull repeatedly." The tumble has become a battering. The stanza also ends without a full stop, so the sentence seems to run on into the next, as the thoughts do.
The poem has no regular rhyme scheme and no steady metre. Lines are uneven, and the language stays close to ordinary speech: "what ifs," "worst case scenarios," "keep them at bay." This plainness suits the subject, since nobody lying awake at three in the morning thinks in polished verse. The ellipsis after "worst case scenarios…" is one of the poem's quietest moments. The line trails off as if the speaker has stopped trying to finish the thought. Rhythm comes instead from repetition. "Thoughts" appears again and again, and "haunt" returns in "haunt me" and "they haunt me still." Several lines also end on the word "me" ("haunt me," "leave me be," "from me"), which keeps the focus on one person, alone with his or her own head.
The middle of the poem explains why the thoughts won't stop. Two stanzas begin "If only," and both are wishes for control. First the speaker would "tune them out," like a radio, or "force my mind to go blank." Then comes the more telling wish, to "put voice to those thoughts." The poem suggests that speaking is the real cure and that silence is the problem. The chain that follows is neat and a little cruel: "the waiting only leads to wondering. / And wondering causes the constant buzz." The "w" sounds link the words together, and "buzz" is exactly the sound of an insect that can't be swatted.
Only in the fifth stanza do we learn that another person is involved. "Is she having these same thoughts?" The speaker imagines her having "finally been able to keep them at bay," as if the thoughts were an army outside a wall. Her sleep is something she "deserves." Even in the middle of the speaker's own misery there is tenderness, since wishing her peace takes a kind of generosity. Yet the question can't be answered. "I do not know, and that gives more thoughts, / More wondering." The short line "More wondering" falls away quickly, which makes the spiral feel faster.
The ending is a small act of surrender. Having tried reasoning, wishing and questioning, the speaker simply asks: "Please someone take these thoughts from me." There is no clever turn here, only a plea, almost like a child's. Then the poem repeats its opening line, "Why do these thoughts keep me awake?", and this time it stands alone as a single-line stanza. Because the first and last lines are identical, nothing has been resolved. The poem ends where it began, which is how a sleepless night feels from inside.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't dress up an ordinary struggle. Most readers have lain awake rehearsing a conversation, and the poem recognises that experience honestly and without exaggeration. It also hints at an irony. The speaker wants silence in the mind but can't get it without first breaking silence with another person. By ending with a question instead of an answer, the poem leaves us with the same unease the speaker has.