The joke in "Guacamole" waits until the last line: "I forgot to ask them to dinner." Everything before it is a host's anxious, mounting bookkeeping about guests who haven't turned up. Only the ending reveals that the anxiety was unnecessary, and that the host caused it. The poem is a small comedy of self-deception, and under the comedy there is something lonelier.
It is built like a stretch of overheard speech. There is no punctuation, no capital letters, and almost no connective tissue. Each line or pair of lines is a separate utterance, and the white space between them works like the minutes the host spends waiting. The lines "I wonder that they will come" and "do I hear them" are each left alone on the page, as if the speaker were stopping to listen at the door. The poem doesn't rhyme, and nothing in it sounds like "poetry" in the old sense. Its rhythm is the stop-start rhythm of someone talking while doing something else, which in this case is cooking.
The speech is grammatically relaxed in a way that sounds real: "they must have went home," "look at that floor," "look I'm cooking all these leaves for nothing." The repeated "look" is the habit of a person addressing someone, though we never learn who. Other voices seem to cut in. "You and your friend there what's her name" sounds like a remembered or imagined conversation, and "all yes a quiet evening at home" reads like a snatch of the invitation itself, or of the host rehearsing it. The poem doesn't say whether these are memories, imaginings or real talk in the room. That blur is part of the effect, because the host's mind has become crowded with voices while the house stays empty.
The title makes a promise the text never keeps. "Guacamole" suggests a party dish, something put out for company. The word never appears again, and the food we actually see is tortillas and "leaves." The oddest line is "these things aren't alive they're tortillas," which is funny in its insistence. It also accidentally describes the evening, since the kitchen is full of things that are not alive and nobody else is there. The practical detail "bends because there's still some moisture inside it" shows the host still testing the food, still going through the motions of readiness, while the social purpose of the meal drains away.
The poem moves through stages of rationalizing. First comes the hopeful vagueness of "anytime after four." Then comes irritation, with the leaves "for nothing." Then the host reaches for explanations: they "must have went home," "some time in the early evening means" (the sentence trails off, as though the host is arguing over what the invitation meant), and then the face-saving "they never intended to come for dinner." Even "they won't be hungry" is a small consolation offered to nobody. The military phrase "no development from mess call" is a good example of the poem's dry humor. A bugle summons soldiers to eat, and here the call goes out and nothing develops. "Well I'm ready" sounds both prepared and a little defeated.
Then the last line undoes all of it. If the guests were never asked, their absence is no insult, and no one has been stood up. The host has produced hurt, suspicion and excuses entirely alone. That is both ridiculous and sad, because it shows how easily a mind can invent a drama of rejection to fill an empty evening. "My guests haven't arrived" has already hardened into a fact before the poem admits they were never guests at all.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Nothing in it is ornamental, and the images are plain objects like a floor, leaves and tortillas. Its subject is the ordinary speech of someone talking to himself, and it makes that speech reveal a person's hopes, defensiveness and embarrassment. Judging by the way it is put together, the poem trusts the reader to hear the gaps between the lines, and the last line rewards that attention with a laugh that stings a little.