Dave Bonta's "To-do list" borrows the plain, bossy voice of a household checklist and then slowly lets it drift somewhere stranger. The first instructions are gentle and almost childlike: practice walking, start in the yard, talk to a stone. It sounds like someone relearning how to be in the world, perhaps after a long stretch of stillness, though the poem never says why.
Then comes "Do nothing," the shortest line and the calmest one. After that, the list tips into something dreamlike. A black dog wanders into the kitchen, and the speaker is told to eat "a great head," too big to boil. The image is odd and a little unsettling, funny and ominous at once.
The mood is quiet, wry, and slightly eerie. The speaker seems patient with themselves, treating slowness, silence, and strangeness as ordinary tasks. The poem suggests that paying attention to the world can be a kind of work, even when it looks like nothing.