2:43

Poetry

December 6, 2025

Recursion as horror. A lyric piece born from chronic insomnia and the unsettling exactness of waking at 2:43 a.m., night after night.

Read "2:43" at Emerald City Ghosts →

About the Work

Author's Note: This piece emerged from a period of chronic insomnia where I kept waking at 2:43 a.m., night after night. The exactness of the time unsettled me—the same moment, over and over. Recursion as horror. I wrote through those nights, keeping my notes at my bedside, and later discovered a natural rhythm buried in the chaos. What began as scattered incoherent ramblings became something lyrical through editing, layering, and more editing. The setting draws from my memories of living in Seattle years ago—those fog-filled early mornings when I used to commute and dream up creepy scenarios I lacked the skill to execute. This time, the words finally came.

Inspiration: The piece explores self-haunting: not being haunted by something external, but discovering you're haunting yourself. The warnings you write but won't heed. The threshold between waking and dreaming, past and present, self and other. Writers like Kafka, Pessoa, and Tanizaki understood identity as performance, reality as provisional. That in-between state—observation without conclusion, questions without answers—is the fertile substrate for this work.

Process: I compiled those nocturnal notes and found they were naturally incoherent, chaotic. Initially I thought it would become autofiction, but the rhythm demanded something more lyrical. The editing became about layering temporal collapse, letting the recursion echo through structure as well as content. Copper taste. The ceiling breathing. Doors multiplying. Each element had to reinforce that sense of being trapped in a loop you're creating yourself.

Poetry | Dean Bowman

Poems from the spaces between worlds—exploring the longing we carry, and the moments that make up a life.

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