"Asta La Vista Baby" sounds like a swagger, a slangy, shrugging goodbye tossed over the shoulder on the way out. The subtitle, «Behind a front», undercuts it. A front is a facade, and the title's cool bravado becomes the poem's first example of its subject: acting tough or breezy to cover what you actually feel.
The poem is built from eight quatrains, each opening with "A" and a single noun: smile, tear, fight, death, wedding, mistake, gift, poem. The indefinite article makes each one a type rather than a particular event, so these are any smile, any funeral, any present. The nouns move from small gestures to big social rituals, and each is then unpacked in three clipped lines that read like dictionary definitions with an edge. The smile is "Easy to fake." The fight is "Just for show." The mourner is "Acting a mess, / Not really affected." Again and again, the outward act and the inner reality don't match.
Some stanzas twist more cleverly than others. In the death stanza, "dress" and "acting" turn mourning into costume and theatre. The wedding stanza starts with "New beginnings" and "Joyous celebrations", then drops in "Divorces coming". The plural makes it a general pattern rather than one unlucky couple, and "coming" echoes "beginnings" in sound, as though the ending was folded into the start. The gift stanza turns on a sudden command. After the present is "Accepted with grins", the voice orders "Go to the sea, / Set it adrift." The grin is the smile of the first stanza again, now shown as the cover for a gesture of rejection, and "gift" and "adrift" rhyme at either end of the stanza, closing the cycle.
The poem is not simply cynical, though. The tear is "Built over years" and "Full of hurt, / And worldly fears", which sounds slow, accumulated and real, not put on. This suggests the fronts exist because the hurt is real. The "mistake" stanza is the most compressed: "Full of hatred, / Parents distaste, / Abandoned in haste." Without verbs or clear subjects, it can be read as a child treated as a mistake and cast off, but the poem never says so, and that gap fits a poem about things left unsaid. Notice too that the speaker never says "I". Only "your might" and the command "Go" address anyone, so the voice itself stays behind its front.
The sound shapes the effect. Lines are short, mostly two or three beats, so the poem moves with a tapping, chant-like insistence. Rhyme is present but unreliable: pain/gain, years/fears, dress/mess, distaste/haste, and fight/might wrapping around the fight stanza. Yet the line carrying the rawest feeling often sits outside the pattern. "Hurt" has no partner, "hatred" doesn't rhyme with what follows, and "Not really affected" lands without an echo. The tidy chiming is the performance, and the rhymeless words are where something real shows through.
Then the rhyme gives out altogether. In the last stanza, "feelings", "emotion" and "knowledge" don't chime at all. The poem puts itself on the list: "A poem, / Conveying feelings, / Showing emotion, / Devoid of knowledge." That is an open question. The speaker may be admitting that a poem can display feeling without understanding it. Or the line may accuse poems, and perhaps the whole performance we have just read, of being one more front. Either way, ending on "knowledge" rather than "emotion" leaves a worrying thought: we see what people show us, but we cannot know what lies behind it.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. Its form is almost childishly simple, a list of nouns with a few lines each, but the simplicity lets you test every stanza against your own life. Have you smiled when you didn't mean it, or gone to a ceremony and played the part? By turning the charge on itself in the final stanza, the poem avoids lecturing from a safe distance. It admits that the one doing the observing may be wearing a mask too.