Insomnia Poem by Norman F. Santos

Affable moon pestering with a silver smile
You have met a diffident withholding a cynic eye
But what is there a reticent boy ought to do?
Inside your impassable time; a temptation in overdue
Your guise of enigma and your baffling lullaby
Perturbs a curious fire kindling austerely high
Your enigmatic hair of velvet black
Is a sinister secret like a dead man’s rock
Nocturne silence, anarchy sleeps its rage
Beneath your canopy, multiplying in your heritage
“Can I define you? ” this boy braved to ask
And his lopsided grin revealed peril in the crust
“Hollow, innocuous, worth a dime.
Your riddles are but words fated to rhyme
Dreams are but a fashion, sleep a hiatus
And we are all dead fishes in a river ominous.”
The night cried in her couture dews
For another sleeper misconstrued
Her omnipresence, her cold supple embrace
Bled out of verve with the boy’s chase.