Anyone who has taken the London Underground knows "Mind the gap" as a recorded warning about the space between train and platform. Dave Bonta borrows that small, practical order and aims it at something less physical. His eight-line poem is about the gaps between things: between what is and what is imagined, between sense and nonsense, between one sentence and the next. The title sets up the poem's central idea, which is that difference is something to step across carefully, and perhaps to play with.
The first sentence does the heavy lifting: "My Zen is / about difference: / a way to make / it up." Zen is popularly associated with dissolving distinctions, so a Zen that is "about difference" is a small paradox from the start. The real trick lies in the last phrase. "Make it up" can mean to invent, so Zen becomes a kind of improvisation, a way of fabricating one's own path. But set beside the word "difference," it also echoes the idiom "make up the difference," meaning to supply what is missing. Bonta splits that idiom across the line break, leaving "make" hanging at the end of one line before "it up" arrives alone. The reader hesitates in a tiny gap of white space at exactly the point where the sentence has to be bridged. The poem is doing what its title tells us to do.
The tone is dry and slightly teasing. "My Zen" is a wry possessive, as if the speaker had a personal brand of enlightenment, assembled to taste. The colon promises an explanation, but what follows is more a shrug than a definition. That fits the way the poem treats certainty throughout: it states things plainly and lets them stay slippery.
The second half shifts into a different register. "I have hopes / to burn" plays on the familiar phrases about having money or time "to burn," meaning more than enough. Hope, usually fragile and precious, becomes a surplus, even something disposable. The verb also carries a faint spiritual charge. Burning suggests letting go, which sits comfortably with the Zen of the opening, though the poem never says so outright. It is possible to read the line as generous, cheerful, or faintly reckless, and the poem does not choose.
Then comes the strangest line: "I have / seen the Queen / of Bohemia." The phrase "I have" repeats from the line before, and this echo links the two claims even though their meanings have nothing to do with each other. Bohemia was a historical kingdom, and the word has also long meant an unconventional, artistic way of living, so the phrase pulls toward both history and lifestyle. Judging by the way it arrives, the claim is meant to be unverifiable and slightly absurd, like a boast or a koan. After a statement about hope, it lands as a leap with no connecting logic. The reader has to mind the gap between the sentences, just as the title warned.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no regular rhyme and no fixed metre, and the lines are short, mostly three or four syllables, which gives a clipped, breathy rhythm. Yet sound still connects things quietly. "Zen" in the first line and "seen" in the seventh form a slant echo, so the poem's opening and closing ideas are tied by sound even while their sense pulls apart. The three plain, declarative sentences also keep the poem steady, as if the speaker were calmly laying out stepping stones.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It turns a transport warning into a philosophy, plays on two idioms at once, and ends on an image that explains nothing and so invites everything. It also shows that a poem can be built from its own gaps: line breaks, silences, and the jump from hope to royalty. Rather than closing those gaps, Bonta leaves them open and lets the reader decide how to cross.