Insomnia

I've been sitting here for hours, watching the reflection of blackness on the dark glass. Sitting in a high-backed chair, mostly as still as the trees whose silhouettes loom, dark on dark, on the riverbank a few hundred yards from my room, still as statuary on this windless summer night. The clock on the wall tick-tocks inexorably on its way, always trying to step into the future, but always locked in the implacable present, never able to turn back, even for a moment, every passing tick and tock consigned for ever to that frozen, unreachable realm that is the past. As I look from my window onto the slumbering street below, nothing moves, no sounds reach my ears, all life seems to have sucked from the earth as though by some alien force, which for some unknown, unknowable reason, has passed me by, left me alone as the sole survivor of the once teeming hordes. Finally, I have to shift and stretch, before immobility strangles my muscles into ropes of cramp, but it's only a spasm, I soon resume my vigil, my sentinel position, watching for any sign that the night will come to an end, that I will be released from this netherworld of plangent silence, given a last hope of resurrection from this oblivion of sleeplessness, but no vestige of even a false dawn manifests itself, the stygian gloom marches on relentlessly, by the second, by the minute, by the hour. I know that this torment must surely come to an end, surely the ink-black sky will be suffused with that almost imperceptible lightening towards the darkest of blues, surely sometime soon, before I lose my reason, my mind ripped to shreds like Pentheus by the maenads, Hypnos, I beg of you, save me from my curse, this curse of wakefulness.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B