Five lines, two sentences, and a switch that the title has already warned us about. Dave Bonta's "Bait and switch" is short enough to memorize in a minute, yet it keeps rearranging itself the longer you look at it.
Take the first line: "At my office I change the office." The word repeats, but it doesn't have to mean the same thing twice. The first "office" is a place, a desk and a window and a hum of equipment. The second could be that same room with the furniture shoved around, but "office" also means a duty or a post, as in holding public office or a mediator's "good offices." So the speaker might be moving a desk or quietly altering what the job is. The poem never says which. That is the first bait: a flat, confident, almost bureaucratic statement, nine steady syllables with "office" landing twice like a rubber stamp, while its key word slides out from under it.
After that the lines shrink: four syllables, five, four, then one. The poem gets narrower as it goes, like a funnel. Lines two to four also run into one another with no punctuation, so the sentence tumbles forward. That suits its subject, because a rationalization works the same way: each clause makes the next feel inevitable. "A good mind thinks" could be a complete compliment if we stopped there. It may even faintly recall the proverb about great minds thinking alike. The next line, "a good argument," seems to promise a moral. Instead the sentence swerves into "to do other- / wise."
That last break is the poem's cleverest move. "Otherwise" is cut in two, so the word is itself doing otherwise, splitting from its expected shape. The cut also exposes what was inside it all along. "Wise" is an old word for manner or way, and "otherwise" means "in another way." Left alone on its own line as the poem's final syllable, it also takes on its everyday meaning of sensible, knowing. The suggestion is that to do otherwise is a kind of wisdom, or at least that wisdom is what the speaker claims for it.
The sound supports this. There is almost no conventional rhyme, but a long *i* runs through the poem like a thread: "my," "I," "mind," "wise." Those are the words of the self and the self's thinking, and the poem ends on the one that claims the self is clever. The word "good" appears twice, and it is slippery. A good mind might be a morally upright one, or just a nimble one. A good argument might be a sound one, or merely a persuasive one that excuses what we already wanted to do.
That ambiguity gives two ways to read the poem. In one, it celebrates small freedom. Within a dull, rule-bound workplace, the speaker reshapes their surroundings, or their role in them, and has the intelligence to justify it. In the other, it is wry self-mockery: a mind that is "good" at inventing reasons to dodge the expected task. The title leans toward the second reading, since bait and switch is a salesman's trick of luring you in with one offer and substituting another. Here the mind seems to run the trick on itself. It baits itself with an argument, then switches the plan. But the poem doesn't force a verdict, and its charm lies in holding both readings at once, much as "office" holds two meanings.
What makes the poem worth reading is how closely its form matches its content. It describes a switch and performs one, in the doubled "office," the severed "otherwise," and the way a proverb-sounding line turns into something stranger. It also finds drama in about the least poetic setting available, the workplace, without complaining or lecturing. The poem implies a whole small act of resistance, or self-deception, in under twenty words. It shows that a poem can be funny and philosophical at once, and that a line break can carry as much meaning as a sentence.