The first line of Dave Bonta's poem doesn't quite work as English, and that is where its interest begins. "I tell my mind / to the barber" sounds like a sentence that has lost a word. Are we meant to hear "I tell my mind to go to the barber"? Or "I tell my mind" in the sense of confiding it, handing it over, the way a person talks freely in the chair? The poem never settles this. It lets both readings sit side by side, then adds a third by continuing: "put things in order / to go away."
Read as an errand, the poem is simple. The speaker is about to leave, so the mind is sent to the barber to be tidied up first. A haircut is a small, ordinary ritual of preparation, and the poem treats the mind as something that can be trimmed in the same way. The central idea is that getting ready to leave is as much an inner task as an outer one. The hair is the visible part, but the real work is the sorting of thoughts.
The phrase "put things in order" gives that idea some weight. It is the kind of thing people say about packing, but also about settling their affairs, and "to go away" is wide enough to hold either meaning. It could be a holiday, a move, or something far more final. The poem gives no evidence to choose between them, and it seems to prefer it that way. The vagueness of "things" helps. We are never told what needs ordering, so each reader fills the word with their own unfinished business.
The construction is as spare as the subject. Each of the four lines runs to only four or five syllables, with two or three beats, so the poem moves in short, even steps. There is no rhyme, though "barber" and "order" share a soft, unstressed ending that works like a quiet echo, linking the person who tidies with the tidying itself. The vocabulary is almost entirely plain and short: *tell*, *mind*, *put*, *things*, *go*. Nothing is ornamental. The poem looks barbered, with every spare word cut away, and the missing verb in the first line is part of that economy.
The line breaks do much of the work. "I tell my mind" can stand alone as a complete thought, a speaker addressing himself. The next line then swings the sentence toward the barber, and the break after "order" lets "to go away" arrive as a separate beat. Because of that pause, the departure can be read as the purpose of the tidying, or as a final instruction to the mind itself: put things in order, then go away. The poem also ends without a full stop, so "away" is left hanging, which suits a poem about leaving.
The imagery is all in the reader's head. The barber is named but never described, yet one word brings the chair, the mirror, the cloth around the shoulders and the scissors working near the skull. The poem does not say these things, and it does not need to. Placing the mind in a barber's hands also makes the barber a kind of confidant, someone to whom people traditionally talk while being made presentable.
The title, "Proverbial (9)," adds another layer. Judging by the number in brackets, this is probably one of a numbered group of short poems, though the text alone cannot tell us more than that. A proverb packs advice into a few memorable words, and this poem borrows that compression while scrambling the logic. It sounds like folk wisdom, but what it offers is a puzzle, and the reader has to work out what is being advised.
That is the poem's real achievement. In four short lines it turns a routine errand into a question about what it means to be ready to leave. It also shows how much a poem can do through grammar alone: a missing word, a line break and an open ending are enough to make a haircut feel like a small farewell.