Sleep gets a glowing reference in the first line and is politely set aside by the second. "Sleep is a great refreshment / but will not do anything / for the sea": Dave Bonta builds the poem on the small turn at "but," and what follows is the speaker working out what the sea is and what it is not. The title, "Insomnia," tells us where the speaker is standing. They are awake, with plenty of time to notice that rest, however welcome, answers only one kind of need.
The sea is never explained, and that is the poem's boldest move. Given the title, it is tempting to read it as the vast, dark expanse of the sleepless mind, or perhaps the night itself. The poem keeps it open, and the openness helps. Sleep can restore a tired body, but the sea does not tire and needs no restoring. On this reading, the speaker's trouble is not a shortage of sleep. It is an encounter with something sleep was never designed to handle.
The diction is quietly funny. "Refreshment" and "obtain" belong to the vocabulary of shops, supplies and transactions, and the speaker approaches the sea like a customer looking for the right counter. Then the sea refuses the role: it is "no ship I might / obtain something from." A ship carries cargo. You can hail it, trade with it, be rescued by it. The sea offers none of that. The grammar is slightly slippery, since "which" could point back to the sea or even to sleep, and both readings hold, because neither is a vessel that hands over what the speaker wants. The line break also strands the preposition "from" at the end of its line, a small grammatical image of reaching for something and finding nothing to take.
The poem's form is just as spare. It is free verse with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the opening line sounds like an offhand remark rather than a poem. The stanzas shrink, from three lines to two to two, and the lines are short, running from about seven syllables down to the three of "for the sea." That short line is a drop-off, a ledge where the sentence's real subject suddenly appears. Without rhyme, sound does the binding. "Sleep," "sea," "ship" and "something" repeat soft s and sh sounds, like surf or a whisper in a dark room. It is a hush the speaker never mentions but the reader hears.
The last stanza is where the poem opens up. "Empty" sits alone on its line, surrounded by white space, so the page itself looks empty. Then the next line complicates it: "and with much more than I know." The sea is empty of ships, of usable cargo, of anything to obtain, yet it holds more than the speaker can account for. The grammar floats again, and the description might fit the sea, the night, or the speaker. An insomniac may well feel hollowed out and crowded at once. Either way, emptiness here means capacity rather than absence. The poem's only mention of the speaker's own mind, "than I know," is an admission of limits.
That modesty is much of what makes the poem worth reading. A poem about sleeplessness might be expected to pile up clocks, ceilings and tossing, but this one has none of them. In a handful of plain words it suggests that wakefulness can be a form of attention, and that the sleepless are sometimes facing something large rather than merely failing to rest. It also makes a quiet point that reaches beyond the night. The obvious remedy does not fit every trouble, and what we cannot use or fully know may still deserve our attention.