Sleep usually gets sold to us as a reward, a soft dark where tired people are restored. Michael John Pickering's "Sleep" turns that comfort inside out. His sleeper is called "the feeder," and the dreams that arrive to feed him turn out to be a meal made of everything he failed to do. Rest becomes a kind of digestion, and what gets digested is a life's worth of regret.
The opening already unsettles. "Sleeps come to the feeder / and feeds him with dreams": the noun is plural and the verb singular, as though the poem can't decide whether sleep is many separate nights or one single force. Whether the wobble is deliberate or not, it suits a subject that blurs. "Feeder" is an animal word. The man has no name and is defined only by appetite. The next line, "This life is halved," suggests sleep takes half of existence. It also hints that the waking half is lived in effort, "to gather and to grow / or become the grave." Those three g-words carry a whole life in one sound, from getting to growing to dying, and the "or" leaves no third option.
The turn comes with "the missed mark / returns like / a forgotten humour." "Missed mark" suggests an archer's failed shot. "Humour" probably carries its old sense of a bodily fluid or temperament, so the failure comes back like an illness thought to be cured. Notice the line breaks. "Returns like" and later "undoing; like" both end on the word "like," leaving the comparison hanging in mid-air. The poem then stops resolving anything and simply piles up images: ancestors' eyes, forgotten hungers, missed matings. After "returns" no sentence ever settles, and the poem closes on a list. That loose, associative drift is how dreams behave, and the form reproduces it.
The images repay slow reading. The "dark spirit eyes / of his forefathers" are the only other presences in the poem. They watch rather than speak, and what they watch is "his undoing." The sleeper seems measured against a lineage he has let down. Then comes the strangest phrase: "his hungers that hunger forgot." Even desire has a memory, and it has lapsed. These are wants that went unmet and were then abandoned, which is sadder than simple frustration.
Sound does quiet work in a poem with no rhyme scheme. "Missed matings, mismatings / of meat and mind" clumps its m-sounds together, and the near-echo of "matings" and "mismatings" sounds like a stammer, a thing trying and failing to fit. The pairing of "meat and mind" sets body against thought, so the mismatch is bigger than a sexual one. It is the failure of appetite and intelligence to work together. "Heat" and "meat" nearly chime across the lines, one of the few echoes the poem allows.
The ending completes the eating metaphor in the cruellest way. The feast is spoiled: "the ripe stuff rotted or the seed / dessicated." Two kinds of failure sit side by side, the fruit that came too early or lingered too long, and the seed that never had the chance to grow. Excess and lack both end in waste. The last word is long, dry and hissing, and it lingers where a full stop might have consoled.
Formally this is free verse, with short, irregular lines that stretch toward the end as the list accumulates. The plain vocabulary of food, farming and animal life (feeder, digests, hungers, meat, ripe, seed) runs through all of it. Human regret is described in the language of the body, as if it were something the organism has to process.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses the idea that night heals us. It suggests that the mind keeps its accounts even when the body lies still, and that dreams are the place where the unpaid bills arrive. The poem stays unsentimental throughout, with no moral and no comfort offered at the close. It leaves the reader to wonder what their own nights are quietly digesting.