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Around 4am at this time of the year

Member since 2002 · Posted 10 Jun 2005 · 9 comments

Daybreak arrives and I am awake to witness it. The solstice is soon and the time is inconvenient. Because this is the darkest time to be awake and the fear is at its strongest I have to find a mental activity to distract me from the light. Oddly this is supplied by watching the sun begin to move and for the trees to become lit. So by seeing the garden lighten outside the bedroom I am able to stave off the fear of the moment caused by the feeling of being here at this time in the light.

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9 comments

[n/a] deleted user 11-Jun-05/5:20 AM Reply

>>oddly<<
Badly chosen.
For some reasons I don't feel the fear of the moment. Because the moment lacks a sense of wonder, perhaps.

[n/a] Nicholas Jones › deleted user 11-Jun-05/9:20 AM Reply

But there isn't supposed to be a sense of wonder. It's the sun coming on on my garden, not very exciting. It's about the terror of not being able to sleep and seeing it get light (which it does very early in Britain in June). But that watching the light distracts me from the whole being unable to sleep thing. Hm. Perhaps the fact I need to explain all this shows the poem doesn't. First draft anyway, needs a re-write.

[n/a] deleted user › Nicholas Jones 11-Jun-05/9:31 AM Reply

Let me rephrase it. No matter how high & mighty mr. Man may feel himself, the daybreak is a cosmic phenomenon and so a mightier one. The way you describe it (mainly in lines 7 & 8, to be fair), it's a rather mechanical happening and it seems to leave you quite cold. But the daybreak is supposed to infuse fear. See what I mean?
It doesn't matter if the hangover has a physical or an alcoholic quality; it doesn't convince.

[2] nentwined › Nicholas Jones 15-Feb-07/6:22 PM Reply

Why are you afraid of not being able to sleep? That's the core, I think, to move the rest along. Maybe. Give us why we should be afraid, that we are afraid, and then pump the fear through our veins. And then show us the sunrise, numbly, in elegant (but not overwrought) detail... the haunting promise that our fears are realized.

[n/a] Blue Magpie 11-Jun-05/11:58 PM Reply

I must admit that I too did not understand what there was to fear here and that the rest elicited very little from me that is worth expressing.

[n/a] Nicholas Jones › Blue Magpie 12-Jun-05/1:30 PM Reply

Have you never woken up at four o'clock in the morning and been unable to get back to sleep and so suffered from a horribly intense irrational fear and sense of complete and total sadness, melancholy and ennui? Perhaps this only happens to me.

[2] nentwined › Nicholas Jones 15-Feb-07/6:20 PM Reply

hmm. tell us more about this. wrap us in...

[2] nentwined 15-Feb-07/6:20 PM Reply

eh. convoluted language just for the sake of sounding poetic?

it's a moment, but the moment has no context that makes me care.

[n/a] Nicholas Jones › nentwined 16-Feb-07/4:16 PM Reply

Blimey, that's a lot of critiquing you've been doing in one day.

It's not about convoluted language. It's about wanting to be able to not think. But to require a mental activity to stop yourself thinking. Because otherwise the horror comes.

Looking at the stuff I've written there are many poems about not being to sleep; it's a subject that means a lot to me. It's why I'm writing this past midnight having got home from a gig; because I'm scared when I do go to bed I might be awake for hours yet. So this poem is about waking up, it's summer, it gets light early, intently watching the changing colours of the sky as the sun rises distracts me from that four am sense of emptiness.

I'm not saying it's a perfect poem, far from it, but the horror and the terror isn't directly in it because it's a poem about avoiding that rather than confronting it.