Two and a half hours: Instead of Sleep

I had just two and a half hours sleep last night, so the mind is a touch tired. I go to a poem I wrote for daughter Helen's birthday in 2004, just to show the problem is not new.

Instead of Sleep

I want to be a cat, Clarissa said,
meaning: it’d be nice to go to bed.
I too think sleep is welcome,
sometimes whole days of it.
I think I could write odes, sonnets,
ballads and epics in praise of it.
Now, feeling sleepy, I think it is time
I woke up and scrawled my darling girl a rhyme,
just a short one, like this, a silly small thing,
a birthday offering,
in which I reflect on how great
it must be to be only twenty-eight;
in which there is a spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings of the kind we know;
in which alliterations, puns and ambiguities
are not mere decorations or superfluities;
in which there is creative tension,
wit, grace, charm, and other virtues I could mention.

That is what I would like to write. Perhaps
that is indeed what I have written,
and as well as it could be by all those other chaps
currently scribbling for Great Britain,
a poem ending in one mighty pentasyllable...

alas, that dream is unfulfillable.

All those chaps, eh? Goodnight, chaps.