Eight short lines, no title, and a row of asterisks where a title should be: Douglas Bowman's poem begins as if we have walked in on a thought already in progress. What follows is a confession made at the hour when confessions are hardest to avoid. A man lies awake and tries to work out what he is for. His answer, that his children make him special, sounds comforting. The poem's phrasing, though, leaves room to wonder how far he believes it.
Look first at how the opening refuses to explain itself. "I send vibrations of regret / do some shuffling." There is no "and," no punctuation, and the two actions simply sit side by side. "Vibrations" is a strangely vague, almost weightless word. Regret here is something transmitted rather than spoken, a signal sent out with no sign that anyone receives it. "Shuffling" is just as slippery. It might mean feet dragging, papers or cards being rearranged, or someone moving things around without getting anywhere. In every sense it is busy and aimless, the movement of a person who cannot settle.
The third line gives us the one hard fact in the poem: "I'm the son of a corporation man." It is flat and declarative, and it is the only line that reads like an introduction. He defines himself first by inheritance, not by anything he has done. "Corporation" matters for what follows, because the vocabulary of the next lines quietly belongs to that world. To "justify my existence" is the language of accounts, where an expense must be defended and a position earned. The poem never says the corporate background caused the insomnia. Judging by the wording, though, he seems to have absorbed a way of measuring himself that he cannot switch off at night.
The line breaks work hard here. "Caught in insomnia" suggests a net or trap rather than a mere condition. Then "fretting over my inability to" ends on the small word "to," so the reader hangs in the same suspended state as the speaker, waiting for the verb. When it arrives, it is "justify my existence," a huge phrase set against the poem's otherwise modest, conversational tone. The poem never raises its voice. The size of the worry shows only in the contrast between the plain diction and the enormity of what is being asked.
Then comes the turn: "except with my children." The preposition is worth pausing on. He does not say "except by" or "except through" them. "With" suggests company, as if his existence is only defensible when they are beside him. The final line, "Thinking: they are what makes me special," arrives after a colon, as though he is quoting his own mind. It is the smoothest line in the poem, almost all monosyllables, with "special" landing at the end. That smoothness can be read two ways. It may be the relief of finding something solid to hold onto. It may equally be a sentence repeated until it sounds true, the kind of reassurance people offer themselves in the dark. "Special" is also a childish, soft word, a long way from the ledger language of "justify," and its gentleness sits oddly against the earlier anxiety.
There is a quieter tension too. The speaker is a son defined by his father's world, and he now finds his worth in his own children. The poem hints, without pressing the point, at a chain in which each generation hands the next the job of proving it mattered. Whether that is tender or troubling, it leaves the children carrying a weight they do not know about.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is free verse with irregular lines, and that suits its subject. Neat form would offer a resolution the speaker does not have. What makes the poem significant is its honesty about a small, modern, unglamorous kind of despair, the sleepless suspicion that one's life needs a defence. It offers an answer, and it lets us hear how thin that answer sounds at three in the morning.