Said aloud, "nothing going on" is a shrug, the answer you give when someone asks what you've been up to. Dave Bonta takes that stock phrase, pulls it apart, and packs the gap with a day's worth of errands. The idiom claims that nothing happened. The line inside it shows dinner, news, two houses and a coffee house, which is a lot of movement for an empty day. The poem is a joke at the expense of its own title, and it turns into a quiet argument about what we choose to count as events.
The shape of the poem makes the joke work. Three lines, the first and last almost bare: "Nothing" at the top, "going on." at the bottom, and between them one long, sprawling line with no punctuation. The phrase is stretched like a day between morning and night, and the busy middle is literally wedged inside the claim of emptiness. As the poem appears here, the whole thing sits in square brackets, which makes it feel like an aside or a note jotted in a margin, something too slight to deserve its own space and so tucked away.
The word "going" is the hinge. In the middle line it is physical: "going to dinner," "to his house," "to my house." In the last line it slides into the abstract idiom "going on." The poem plays the literal sense against the figurative one. A body keeps moving from place to place while the mind files the day under "nothing." Because of the line break, you can even read "Nothing / going to dinner" as though Nothing were a character heading out for the evening, a small piece of personification that the missing punctuation allows.
That missing punctuation also drives the rhythm. The middle line is a run of "to" phrases: to dinner, to hear news, to his house, to my house, to the coffee house. Without commas the reader has to keep moving too, and the line takes on the drifting, slightly breathless pace of a day that slides from one thing to the next. The grammar is slippery as well. "To hear news" reads as a purpose, since they went to dinner in order to hear news, but the next "to" is plainly a direction. The same small word does two jobs, and the line leaves you unsure where one errand ends and another begins.
There is no conventional rhyme, but there is a strong echo. "House" lands three times, in "his house," "my house" and "coffee house," and it sets up a chant-like beat, with the stress falling on "house" each time. The repetition also gives the day a path. It moves from someone else's home to the speaker's own and then out to a public place, and the last stop is longer ("to the coffee house" has five syllables against three in each of the first two). The final phrase swells a little before the short, deflating "going on." Judging by the text, the speaker goes home between visits, so the day is a loop of small social rounds. The vocabulary is plain and nearly all short words, which suits a day the speaker refuses to dignify.
"News" is the most interesting word. News is supposed to be what is going on, yet people go out to hear it and the poem's verdict is still "nothing." One reading is that the hearing and visiting are the point, and the exchange of talk matters more than anything said. Another is gentler and a little sad, that a life full of company can still feel uneventful. The poem doesn't choose, and that openness is part of its charm.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a handful of words it sets an everyday expression against the evidence, and the evidence wins. The title promises a nothing day, but what we see is a day with dinner, talk, neighbors and coffee. Without preaching, the poem nudges the reader to look at their own "nothing" days, the ones we describe with a shrug, and notice how full of going they might be.