A skull begins to talk, and the first thing we learn is that its name has already gone up in smoke. Dave Bonta's "Next Life" opens halfway between a ghost story and a dark joke, then over thirteen unrhymed lines cools into something calm. It asks what "next life" could mean to a speaker who doesn't trust the grand versions of it. The answer is small, physical and oddly comforting: matter changing hands, from bone to owl, leaf to rot, water to frost, with a rumbling stomach somewhere in the mix.
The sound of the opening does a lot of the work. "The skull whose name was smoke spoke" is crowded with s and k sounds, and "smoke" and "spoke" nearly rhyme, so the line sounds like a spell or a tongue-twister. It is the closest the poem comes to rhyme, and it doesn't keep it up. "Worm words" adds a mumbling alliteration, and then the missing teeth "hissed," the s sounds standing in for air leaking through gaps. Even the skull's name, smoke, suggests identity as something that drifts and can't be held. The voice comes "from the gizzard of an owl," not from a mouth. The skull has been swallowed and is already part of another creature's body.
The speaker's reaction is mild, even amused: "How odd, I thought, to be a skull / & haunt a body from within!" The ampersand and the lone exclamation mark give the line a jotted, offhand quality. The thought is also neat. Everyone carries a skull, so "haunting a body from within" is simply a description of being alive. The poem delivers that unsettling idea as a passing curiosity, without a sermon.
Then the poem leaves the vision and steps into the weather. "The air smelled of rotting / leaves; it was October." The line break lets "rotting" hang for a moment, and the flat "it was October" reads like a note to self. What follows is the poem's most beautiful image: "Icy feathers began to form / on the edges of grass blades." The feathers quietly recall the owl, so a bird is turned into frost without any announcement. The speaker calls this "the only kind of next life / that made sense to me, stoned as I was." That admission undercuts his authority, but it also makes the claim more honest. Frost is temporary, delicate and made of ordinary water, which makes it a believable afterlife for someone who wants one without a heaven attached.
The last two lines return to the body. "My gut gurgled polyphonically" is a comic mismatch, a grand musical word for a stomach noise. Polyphony means many voices sounding at once, and the gut's chorus answers the skull's single worm-voice. Both speak from inside the body, and both remind the speaker that he is a working organism as well as a mind. The poem's vocabulary is built on this theme of eating and decay: worm, owl, gizzard, rotting, gut. If there is a next life here, it runs on digestion.
The final line, "I considered fear as if from a great height," is the longest in the poem and moves at an unhurried pace. Fear becomes a landscape seen from above. Judging by the imagery, the height might belong to the owl's vantage, though it could equally be the lofty detachment of being high. The phrase "as if" matters, because it admits the calm may be an effect and not a permanent state.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it holds horror and ease together without choosing between them. It doesn't flinch from the skull, the worms or the rot, and it doesn't turn them into melodrama. Its free-verse lines settle from a clotted, hissing start into a level, almost meditative close, a movement that mirrors the speaker's slide from startle to acceptance. In under a hundred words it offers a modest idea of survival: nothing escapes, everything is recycled, and sometimes the recycled thing is as lovely as frost on a blade of grass.