SLEEPLESS:
Awake all night in Peckham, longing for big Essex skies.
I watch Karlheinz Stockhausen documentaries, manipulating the
volume, mixing street sounds. It keeps me awake, long enough to
ok edits & mixes happening across the room. The body longs to
curl up in comfort, but the schedule demands it remain awake to
accompany the head. The mind plays games to simulate adrenaline,
the arms hang limp & ache. Stockhausen hisses & honks, slipping
radio dials across stations, fragments of random conversation,
morse code, frequency harmonics – the ears blur in sympathy with
the symphony of the eyes, the thighs tingle silently inside the
jeans.
The nice lady smiled as she showed me my sunlit room, that was
yesterday, now it’s dull, dirty orange after midnight in the glow
of designer street lamps, bill paid & empty. In the room of edits
& mixes the Kettle remains the constant, coffee on maximum rotation,
whistle hissing, underscoring Stockhausen’s oscillations.
The walls are covered in words describing scenes from a journey
I’ve taken on days away from rehearsals in sodden shoes trudging
through mud beneath embedded in a low woollen hat to shelter from
a freezing wind.
Stockhausen is still lecturing as I snap back into consciousness
about the state of ‘not thinking’ & my skin has begun to itch,
the texts & emails stopped hours ago, everyone I know has gone to bed.
(K)
Karl Hyde 
This might make you laugh… love your music and art… here is mine to share with ya!
http://sketchylife.wordpress.com/
Dude, sleeplessness if gone too long will leave me in a very dangerous place. Some people get used to it.
It has been an effective psychological torture technique in breaking people down. It will make a normal person slip into some unstable places.
After my late wife died, I went 3 years with very broken sleep. Lost sleep every night. I can get to sleep no sweat, staying asleep a different issue. Sometimes in that cycle, I’d go a couple of weeks in that pattern and finally sleep a night after shear exhaustion. Then back to waking at 2, 3, 4 am and not being able to reach sleep until about 8a. It will make you crazy and old before your time but if you’ve already have an immunity…just know I think of people’s safety first.
It endangered my stability on 3 occasions during those three years but not enough to go “section8” as you say in the UK. Sometimes here, we say, “5150’d” (state codes) – means 3 days of observation on a psyche ward. “5152’d” is a three week tour of the psyche ward. Either way, they can do some weird shjt to you…did me. A/C to the head in fact. (ECT)
Finally, in January 2009, I started sleeping again. I’ve actually considered taking sleep on London time to sync up better with Alison but the schedule interferes with things in my daughter’s life.
Anymore, a lack of sleep just makes me pissy.
Take care.