Insomnia usually gets described as a lack, something missing from the night. In "Sleeplees," the sleeplessness is a choice made out of fear. The speaker lies in bed "not wanting to close my eyes," because closing them means meeting someone in "the blackness of my dreams." The poem is about a former partner who has been removed from the speaker's life but not from their mind. Its central idea is that deleting is easy and forgetting is not.
The title is spelled "Sleeplees," which looks like a slip for "Sleepless." Whether or not it was meant, the word is the poem's frame. "Sleepless" opens the first line and comes back in the last, and the poem never really leaves the night it begins in.
The opening has a slightly awkward ambiguity. "Not wanting to close my eyes, / just to see you there" can be read two ways: the speaker refuses to shut their eyes only to find the other person waiting, or, more painfully, the pull toward that image is part of what keeps them awake. The poem doesn't settle this, and the confusion suits a mind that wants and dreads the same thing. The dream-world is "blackness," which could be an ordinary dark. Given what comes next, it also looks like a switched-off screen, with the face appearing on it uninvited. That is my reading, but the poem's turn to phones makes it plausible.
That turn arrives with "Sure I can delete." The "Sure" is offhand and almost shrugging, as if the speaker is conceding the easy point first. Then three short lines follow, each one an object: "your number, / your photos, / your texts." The line breaks make each item a separate act of removal, and the lowercase "your" keeps them small and administrative. These are things a thumb can erase in a minute.
The poem then changes register. The same verb returns, "But how do I delete / Your face? / Your voice? / And our memories?" Now "delete" is stretched over things it cannot touch, and the stretch exposes the gap between how we manage relationships now and how the mind works. Two details sharpen this. The capital in "Your" suggests the person has grown larger than the phone data, even if the capital is accidental. And the last question begins with "And," as though the speaker is adding an afterthought, when it is really the heaviest item on the list. Up to that point it has been "your" face and "your" voice. Memories are "our," shared and half belonging to the speaker, so they can't be cleared out like someone else's number.
There is no rhyme, and the poem uses free verse. Its rhythm comes from the length of its lines instead. The third line stretches out, carrying the whole picture of the speaker lying awake. Then the lines shrink to fragments, mimicking the list and the quick clicks of deleting. The three questions are clipped, a stutter of single phrases, before the final two lines slow down again.
Those last lines hold the poem's cleverest turn: "So I can sleep a sleepless night, / without seeing you." The phrase "sleep a sleepless night" is a paradox, but it makes sense emotionally. The speaker no longer hopes for good sleep, only for a bad night with nobody in it. Sleeplessness has become the best available outcome, and the modest ambition makes the loss sound deeper than a bigger complaint would.
Nothing about the writer is given beyond the name "lost and found," which reads like a handle or pen name, so it's safest to let the text speak. The name does echo the poem's concerns, though that may be coincidence. The poem's significance lies in its plainness. It takes a very current kind of heartbreak, in which the evidence of a person sits in a phone and can be wiped in seconds, and shows why wiping it doesn't help. Anyone who has blocked a number and still heard a voice will recognise the situation. The poem is small and unpolished, and it is honest about the one thing that deletion cannot reach.