Insomnia

The mind, awake to the chill of a night and a world stirs and loses hope of sleep. Disturbance ceases, but in the quiet I have a question
My head throbs, pulsates, faster, faster, faster, and faster until
my eyes fall back and I stare
at the midnight shawow of a tree on a wall, swaying, dipping, rising, just rocking.
My mind races one, teeming with the happenings the security, the words.
I tighten my eyes, awaiting sleep.
Pictures, strange and coloured, whirl by.
There is a pattern in a coiled tube with spinning S shapes,
a long thread around the black shadow of a man.
Light wakens the pattern and it becomes a bud; Opening, growing,
living then dying, like us, but green.
The first bud is nipped early. The second is left to become old and infertile.
Then comes the searching, the tossing, the burning and deep inside
I scream "Why are we so like buds?"
But no-one answers.
No-one really knows.

Judith Holmes