Dave Bonta's «Future Tense» opens with a pun and spends eight short couplets making it hurt. "Tense" is the grammarian's word for time, but it is also what a body feels when something is about to happen. Strangely, the poem never uses the grammatical future. Everything happens in the present: "approaches," "fall silent," "i hear." Dread has dragged tomorrow into the room. That is the central idea: worry about what hasn't happened yet is already an event, and it is already feeding on the person who feels it.
The first couplet works like the opening minute of a horror film. "A nameless fear approaches" refuses to say what the fear is, and the silent crickets do the explaining. The poem then turns almost entirely to sound. The speaker hears "thin things / like teeth chattering," and the th-sounds of "thin," "things," "teeth" and "chattering" click against each other like the teeth they describe. Then comes the heart, "thudding against / its slaughterhouse pen." The line break matters here. The heart strikes something, and only after the pause do we learn it is a pen, where animals wait to be killed. The speaker's body becomes livestock, and the speaker is both the frightened animal and the one listening to it.
The next image, breath turning "tenuous as a frayed rope," belongs to a family of words: "thin," "tenuous," "frayed." Each describes something worn almost to nothing. A rope should promise safety, but this one is about to give way. The thinning also prepares for the ending.
The fifth couplet is the turn. "i hear myself saying go on / you don't exist yet." The speaker overhears himself, as if the reasoning voice were separate from the frightened body. "Go on" could be a dismissal or a weary invitation, and the poem doesn't choose. The argument is also a trap. The future doesn't exist yet, which is true, but that is exactly why it can't be argued with. Reason speaks, and the fear keeps coming.
Then the tone shifts with "oh future," the only exclamation in the poem. The indirectness drops, and the speaker addresses his fear head-on, calling it "voracious as a vacuum." The v-sounds hum like a machine, and "vacuum" carries two meanings at once: an empty void and a household appliance that sucks things up. After the crickets and the slaughterhouse, the simile is cold and mechanical. This future does not hate anyone. It simply takes things in.
The closing couplets turn the hunger back on the speaker. "my own appetites have changed / i can count my ribs." Judging by the imagery, anxiety has hollowed him out, whether the hunger is literal or figurative. The ribs also quietly echo the "pen" around the thudding heart, since a rib cage is a kind of enclosure. The last lines, "what else would you have / me consume," flip the earlier logic. The future is the devourer, yet the speaker asks what he should eat, as though it demands to be fed and he has little left to give. "Consume" also means "use up," so the question hints that the only thing left to offer is himself. That is an inference, but the thinning vocabulary supports it.
The form suits this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, written in lowercase, and apart from the apostrophe in "don't" it uses no punctuation at all. Even the final question has no question mark, so the thoughts run on with nowhere to rest. The two-line stanzas are small enclosures, a little like pens themselves, and each holds one frightened observation.
The poem matters because it doesn't explain the fear. It gives us what the fear feels like: the sudden quiet, the noises of the body, and the failed attempt to talk oneself down. Most readers know that state of waiting, which is why a poem this short can feel familiar. It ends on a question, not a resolution, and leaves us in the tension it describes.