Two lines, no punctuation, and a whole sleepless night folded up inside them. Dave Bonta's "Insomniac" says very little outright, and the title does much of the work. It tells us who is speaking and why that speaker's sense of time has come unstuck. Everything else in the poem grows from that one word.
The first line, "morning a too-late prologue to night", scrambles the usual order of things twice. A prologue is what you read before a story begins, yet morning normally comes at the end of the night, not the start. The poem makes it an introduction instead, and a late one, like a preface that turns up after the book is finished. There are at least two ways to take this. Morning may be the belated opening of the next night, which the speaker already dreads. Or it may be a prologue arriving only after the real drama of the dark hours has played out without any rest. Either way, daylight offers no relief here. It is a waiting room.
The grammar helps. There is no verb. The "is" that would normally link "morning" to "prologue" has been dropped, so the metaphor sits there as flat fact, with nothing to argue with. The hyphenated "too-late" does something similar, fusing two words into one heavy lump, as if lateness were a single object the speaker can't put down. The rhythm stumbles at that spot too. "Too-late prologue" bunches its stressed syllables together, so the line lurches in the middle before it settles on the soft landing of "to night."
The second line changes register completely. After the bookish "prologue," we get plain, short words: "my eyes making me sad." Only "making" has more than one syllable. The cleverness of the first line drops away and what is left sounds almost childlike, as if the speaker is too tired to keep up the wit. The grammar is odd here as well. "Making" has no helping verb, so, like the first line, this one never reaches a main verb. Neither line finishes an action, and the poem hangs in suspension, much like the person it describes.
The phrase "my eyes making me sad" also puts the blame on a body part, as though the eyes were acting independently of the self. The poem doesn't say how they cause the sadness, and that leaves room for several readings. They might be sore and heavy but unable to close. They might be forced to take in the grey light of a morning that nobody wanted. They might simply look worn out in a mirror. Whichever we choose, the speaker seems split in two, a mind that wants to stop and eyes that won't.
The poem has no end rhyme, since "night" and "sad" have nothing in common, but it does have quiet sound-patterning. The m-sounds in "morning," "my," "making" and "me" make a low hum through both lines, like someone murmuring to themselves in the small hours. The long *i* in "night," "my" and "eyes" carries across the line break and ties the two lines together without any formal rhyme. The lowercase opening and the missing full stop add to the effect. Nothing is sealed off at the end, so the sadness seems likely to carry on into the next line, or the next night.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from how little it gives. In a handful of words it manages a paradox about time, a wry image, a split between self and body, and a final admission of unhappiness. It is short enough to recall the compression of haiku, though its syllable count doesn't follow that form. The brevity also fits the subject: the poem is as thin and unfinished as the sleep it describes. For a student, it shows that a poem can say a great deal by leaving things out, such as verbs, punctuation and any explanation of the sadness. The reader fills the gaps, and in doing so briefly shares the speaker's wakefulness.