Insomnia

I was doing well in college, had myself
on a schedule:

_____up at 6
_____showered and breakfasted by 8
_____classes from noon to 6
_____dinner
_____study until 10pm
_____bed

Everything was working except for sleep.
I couldn’t sleep
I was reading Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters
_____by Salinger.
There wasn’t anything about that book that troubled me.

Usually reading in bed put me to sleep in five minutes.
No more.

I complained to my friend, George—
two years older than me,
the disgruntled son of a famous man.

George had the solution—brandy!
Sitting in his dorm room where booze
was strictly forbidden, George poured me
a huge snifter of golden hooch. By
midnight we’d finished his pint bottle.

Instead of sleep, we both felt the frisky sting of insobriety.

My insomnia doctor prescribed a journey
to Everybody’s, an afterhours joint down
by the railroad tracks in Laramie. We knocked

on the door at 2 AM and were greeted by
two swarthy gentlemen dressed in leather
jackets and smelling of weed. They gave
us the onceover. Evidently, we two white
college boys didn’t threaten them.

Everybody’s was aptly named: everyone
from white football coaches, black basket
ball players, Rhodes scholars, burnt out|
former students, and residents of the local
pokey on work-release were there.

George and I danced with some cowgirls,
their buckskin coats swirled in the dim light.
We sang, we drank more, we closed the place
and staggered into the rose-colored dawn at 6 AM.

It could be said that George’s cure was successful—
I passed out the second my head hit the pillow that morning.

_____My schedule was kaput.
_____I missed all my classes.
_____It took two weeks for me
_____to finally fall asleep
_____at a reasonable hour.

By then I was reading The Brothers Karamazov in bed,
a gentle sedative that ushered me into
the benign world of patricide and grand inquisitions,

and put me right to sleep.

Charlie Brice’s poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.