Dave Bonta's "Knob" takes the least glamorous part of a machine, the thing you grip to turn the sound up or the heat down, and treats it as a relic worth a small museum. Its central idea sneaks up on you. The knob is one of the places where a human hand and a machine actually touch, and the poem laments the moment when a remote control takes that touch away. It does this with jokes rather than solemnity, which is why it doesn't feel like a sermon.
The opening is the most puzzling stretch and the most rewarding. The knob is a "finite snail evolved from a peg": it has a snail's rounded, shell-like body, but it began as something plainer. Then the poem corrects itself: "all twist & no spiral, turning / neither inward nor upward." A real spiral goes somewhere. It winds toward a centre or climbs toward a point. A knob rotates on the spot and arrives nowhere. From this the speaker draws a startling phrase, "egalitarian metaphysics." The poem seems to mean a world without hierarchy, where no setting on the dial is higher or deeper than another and anyone's fingers can turn it. The next sentence makes us participants: the knob "involves us in the machine's / unfinished business." The machine can't finish its work alone, so it needs a hand to pick a degree of loudness or warmth. That makes us "connoisseurs of the abstract," judging quantities that have no fixed shape.
Then the register drops with a shrug: "And hell, it's fun to roll things / between the fingers— / they were made for this." The abstract talk gives way to the body's own argument. The line "they were made for this" is the shortest and plainest in the poem, and it is also the warmest. Philosophy has to wait while the speaker enjoys the small pleasure of turning something.
The poem's structure comes from the next move, which sets up a pattern of voices. "The caveman in me says / smash it & suck out the marrow." To the caveman, any hard, rounded lump looks like the end of a bone, and the only sensible responses are to break it and eat. "The Medieval peasant says / splash it with holy water / to drive out the small devil / whose millstone it must be." The peasant meets the same object and sees something demonic, a thing that turns and grinds like a mill. Both reactions are ways of coping with a thing you don't understand: devour it or exorcise it. The repeated "says" promises a third voice, and the poem delivers it with a wink: "But I say alas." The mock-archaic "alas" is funny and sincere at once. The modern speaker is the only one who understands the knob, and he turns out to be the only one in mourning.
The last two lines land the joke. "Our machines are surrendering their squat manhood / to a remote." "Squat" suggests something low, stubby and solid, the opposite of a sleek wand. "Manhood" carries a cheeky, bodily overtone that the poem clearly enjoys, since the word "knob" invites it. "Remote" works twice. It is the device, and it is also the distance that now separates us from the things we use.
The form suits the subject. It is a single unbroken stanza of free verse with no rhyme, and the lines are short and turn mid-thought, as in "here's / a key to our egalitarian metaphysics." That makes the sentence twist the way the knob does. The language leans on hard, clipped sounds: "smash it & suck out the marrow," "squat," "snail," "peg." Even the ampersands, used twice, give the lines a casual, hand-jotted look.
The poem is worth reading for its range. In eighteen lines it moves from metaphysics to fingertips to a rough timeline running from cave to medieval village to the living room, and it makes an object we never notice feel like a quiet piece of human history. It is also a poem about touch. It suggests that when our tools no longer ask anything of our hands, we lose a small, real pleasure, and the speaker sounds a little foolish and entirely right to say so.