Almost everyone has done what Dave Bonta's prose paragraph accuses "you" of: kept a private opinion on hold until the crowd moved on and it became safe to say it aloud. «Suspense» has two halves, a block of prose and then a short three-line verse in the manner of haiku. That is the shape of a haibun, and the two halves look at the same restless human habit from opposite ends of a telescope.
The prose half is a small comic spiral. It begins with contempt, "how much you've come to loathe the last thing", then slides into anxiety ("with this economy, who knows…?"), and ends in a nostalgia you haven't even felt yet. Each sentence undercuts the one before. The speaker never says what the "thing" is, and that vagueness is the joke. The word appears five times in three sentences, as if the poem had worn it smooth. It could be a gadget, a song, a diet, or an opinion. What matters is the pattern: you are always positioned between a thing you've outgrown and a thing that hasn't arrived.
The wordplay is sharp. "Last" first means "most recent," then quietly turns into "final" when we reach "the last thing ever." The same two words carry the speaker from boredom to panic. Then the register shifts. After so many flat "things," the closing phrase, "the fervent conviction of nostalgia," sounds almost churchy, a mock-solemn flourish that shows how absurd the imagined grief is. The rhythm helps. The sentences grow longer and more clause-laden, ending in a loose, rolling string of "in which case… someday… with all the…", which feels like a mind talking itself in circles. There is no rhyme anywhere, just the conversational drift of someone thinking aloud, or of someone being thought about.
The haiku breaks that drift. "tea for two" is only three syllables, then comes the longer "the ant holding a crumb" (six), then "above her head" (four). It isn't the strict 5-7-5 pattern, but it keeps the short-long-short feel. The sound is quiet and domestic. "Crumb" and "above" share the same soft vowel, so the last two lines settle into each other. The line break matters too. "The ant holding a crumb" could end there, and only the next line lifts the crumb overhead. The reader gets a small physical surprise, a tiny version of the suspense the title promises.
The image does a lot of work. "Tea for two" suggests an unhurried, companionable moment, and judging by the imagery, the ant has turned up at the edge of it, a small scavenger beside the table. Everything about her is concrete: one ant, one crumb, one gesture. She is the opposite of the abstract "thing" in the prose. And "holding" is a deliberate choice over "carrying." It freezes her mid-action, crumb raised, so that she is literally suspended in the way the "you" of the first paragraph is suspended between last and next.
The two halves never explain each other, and that gap is where the meaning lives. The human is waiting for permission to feel something, while the ant is already busy with whatever has fallen in front of her. A crumb is, after all, a leftover, perhaps what remains of a "last thing" someone has finished. The ant treats it as treasure, whereas "you" will scorn it and then mourn it. The poem doesn't say this outright. It sets the two pictures side by side and lets the reader notice who is happier.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It criticises trend-chasing and the borrowed taste of consumer life without naming a single trend, so the target never goes out of date. Every era has its own "next thing." It is also funny without being cruel, since "you" could just as easily be the reader or the speaker. The haibun form earns its keep here: the prose lays out a restless mind, the haiku offers a still image, and the page leaves the reader to choose between them.