Dave Bonta's poem begins with a serious question and then, halfway through, forgets it. That lapse is the poem's real subject. "What do we do with the other / creatures of this world?" it asks, and the question widens until it takes in other languages, other ways of falling silent, and finally ourselves. By the end the speaker is distracted, and the voices in his ear are telling him to "mind the gap."
The title sets the tone. "An inquiry concerning the poetics of, like, whatever" pairs the stiff phrasing of a philosophical treatise with a teenage shrug. The poem lives in that clash. It has big concerns, such as other species, vanishing languages and borders, but it voices them in a casual, self-mocking register. The shrug turns out to be the thing under examination: whatever is what we say when we have stopped paying attention.
The first stanza-like movement is built on contrasts in how living things respond to the world. "Those that stay put, stay put; / those that move, raise their mobile / devices to the window / and press record." The tautology of the first clause is almost comic, while the second shows us holding up a phone instead of looking. The poem is not against technology here. It points out that recording is a way of not being present, and that we treat the creatures outside the window as content.
The poem then turns the idea around. "Dogs can't be the only ones / whose vocalizations have adapted / to the inattentiveness of the human ear" is a long, Latinate line, and its slow polysyllables suggest how much effort other species spend on being heard. The bird "in New Guinea" that mimics "a camera shutter or a chainsaw" is the poem's sharpest image. In one breath the bird imitates the machine that records the world and the machine that destroys it. Nature, in other words, is learning to speak in our noises. Later the poem returns to this idea when it says that "those that stay put / learn to imitate themselves." The phrase suggests a kind of cultural or ecological self-parody, in which a thing performs a copy of what it used to be.
The poem also works through its structure. It is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its rhythm is that of someone thinking aloud. Lines often end on small, unstressed words ("the other," "in which," "what"), which makes the sentences hesitate and lean forward. The anaphora of "What do we do with…" gives the poem a spine, but each repetition is less sure of itself. The third version, "What do we do with ourselves / during the 99% of our lives / when we are not listening," makes the question personal. The odd statistic is half joke, half accusation. The phrase "the poem (song, prayer) in which / our actual names happen to be recorded" is quietly moving, because it suggests that our identities are held in something we rarely stop to hear. Against this the customs agents "demanding more and more documentation" stand for another kind of recording, one that is bureaucratic, suspicious and obsessed with lines that must not be crossed.
The pivot comes with "I'm sorry, what / was the question again?" The poem now enacts the inattention it has described. The speaker has been "busy collecting photographs of cherubs," and the choice is telling. He loves how the cherubs are "both fleshy and impossible," a phrase that works almost as a description of poetry itself, which is made of real words and invented things. But he is also doing exactly what the people at the window did, which is collecting images instead of answering. The ellipses that trail off after "themselves" and after "task" let the thoughts dissolve rather than conclude.
The ending is the best joke and the saddest. "The voices" tell him to "mind the gap— / over and over, as if that were / our most essential task." The phrase sounds like a public-transport announcement, a harmless instruction repeated until it means nothing. Yet the gap is also the space between species, between languages, between attention and distraction. The poem leaves us unsure whether the voices are absurdly trivial or accidentally wise.
What makes the poem significant is that it avoids both preaching and despair. It lets us laugh, and then notices that we laughed instead of answering. The question about the other creatures of this world is still there, unanswered, behind the poem.