Fireflies watched from a dark room look like pure enchantment, and Dave Bonta's "Mixed Signals" begins by letting them be exactly that. In the first three couplets the lights "wander like the spirits / of lost children / or thoughts flickering / between synapses." The two similes pull in different directions, one ghostly and one neurological, but both treat the flashes as something half-seen and hard to hold. The speaker is watching from inside, and that detail matters later.
Then comes the pivot: "but it's wedding season / and courtship can be perilous." The poem drops its spooky mood and turns to natural history. It describes "an evolutionary arms race / between related species," each with "a signature pattern / of light and darkness." The phrase "light and darkness" is a neat touch, because a firefly's message is made as much of the gaps as of the glow. Then the story turns predatory. The females, "hungry / waiting in the long grass," copy the flash patterns of other species. The poem never says what happens to the males who answer the false signal, but "hungry" and "romantic / dinner for one" let us work it out. The joke is dark. The wedding season is a trap, and the candlelit meal is eaten alone because the guest is the meal.
That line is also where the poem's real subject starts to show. "Dinner for one" is funny, but it quietly applies to the speaker too. The poem closes by returning to where it began: "as inside the dark house / I toss and turn." The repeated "dark house" makes a ring shape, and the speaker, awake and restless, becomes a parallel figure to the creatures outside. Everyone out there is signalling in the dark, and he is lying in it. The title works on several levels. It means the deceptive flashes of the mimics, the confused language of courtship in general, and the poem's own blend of tones: eerie, scientific, comic and wistful. The simile about "thoughts flickering / between synapses" pays off here as well. By the end, the speaker's own sleepless mind is the thing flickering, sending signals that go nowhere.
The final couplet, "ah for a midsummer / night's dream," breaks the title of Shakespeare's play across the line, and the break is clever. The play is famous for lovers who mistake one another and chase the wrong people, which suits a poem about false signals. But "dream" also means the sleep the speaker cannot get. The "ah" is a small, self-mocking sigh, as if he knows he is being a bit theatrical about his insomnia. Judging by the tone, he wants romance and rest and has neither.
The form supports all of this. The poem is free verse in eleven short couplets, with no rhyme and almost no punctuation. The only colon comes after "perilous," where the poem stops to explain itself. Without full stops, one thought slides into the next like a drifting light. Several line breaks cut phrases open: "a romantic / dinner for one," "a midsummer / night's dream." Each break makes you wait a beat for the payoff, much as the females wait in the grass. The rhythm stays conversational, close to a murmur, and sound does the work that rhyme usually would. "Signature pattern," "light and darkness" and "long grass" all echo internally. Plain scientific phrasing like "evolutionary arms race" sits beside the lyrical similes without embarrassment, and the mixture keeps the poem from turning sentimental.
What makes "Mixed Signals" worth reading is how much it fits into so little. It shows that a fact from biology can carry real feeling, and that a lonely night can be funny without ceasing to be lonely. It also points out something we rarely admit: courtship, in fireflies and in people, depends on reading signals that may not be telling the truth.