Fifteen words, two sentences, and the second one never finishes. Dave Bonta's "Proverbial (12)" is small enough to memorise on one reading, yet it keeps unsettling the longer you look at it. The title promises a proverb, a piece of inherited wisdom delivered with confidence. What the poem delivers is a pair of confident-sounding statements, one of which trails off into silence.
Its central idea is a contrast between two places in human life: where we keep time, and where we love. In the first, the verdict is flat and almost bleak: "we are not ready." In the second, the verbs swell: "we exceed, / we eat…". Time-keeping is tied to unpreparedness. Love is tied to overflow. The poem seems to say that the more carefully we measure our lives, the less ready we are for them, while the places where we stop measuring are the places where we are most alive.
The phrase "keep time" carries much of this. It can mean a musician holding the beat, a clock doing its work, or a person guarding hours as if they were a possession. All of these suggest order and control. Yet the line ends in "we are not ready," as if all that careful keeping were a rehearsal that never quite prepares us for the performance. Judging by the wording, readiness might refer to the big things time brings, such as endings and losses, but the poem never says so. It leaves the gap open, which is part of its force. The word "where" also treats these as locations, almost rooms in a house, one for the clock and one for the heart.
The second half breaks that order. "Exceed" means to go beyond a limit, which is exactly what a measured, kept thing is not supposed to do. Love, in this picture, does not stay within its container. Then comes "we eat…", and the ellipsis is the poem's most daring move. Eat what? Time itself, perhaps, which would neatly link the two halves. Or each other, or our own words, or simply everything in reach. The poem refuses to choose. Because the sentence runs out of room before it runs out of appetite, the dots work as a small demonstration of excess. Love exceeds even the poem's ability to say it.
The construction is quietly careful. Both sentences use the same frame, "Where we… we…", which is how proverbs usually work: a balanced pattern that sounds like old wisdom. The collective "we" adds to that effect, because proverbs speak for a whole community and not for one person. But the balance is broken on purpose. The first sentence is complete and closed with a full stop. The second splits into two clauses divided by a comma, and the last line shrinks to just two syllables. After the steady, almost metronomic opening, the rhythm stumbles and stops.
There is no rhyme in the usual sense, but the sound does a lot of work. The long "e" runs through the poem like a held note: "keep," "we," "ready," "exceed," "eat." It binds the two halves together even as their meanings pull apart, and it makes "exceed" and "eat" sound like close relatives, as if overflowing and devouring were one gesture. Every word is short and plain, with no ornament, so the few ambiguous ones, "keep," "exceed," "eat," carry all the weight.
The poem's significance lies in how it plays with its own genre. A proverb normally closes a question, and this one opens it. The number in the title suggests it belongs to a numbered sequence, though the poem itself gives us nothing more to go on, and it works perfectly well alone. What it offers a reader, especially a young one, is a way of thinking about the tension between schedules and feelings, between being on time and being fully present. It does not tell you which to choose. It simply shows time-keeping ending in a flat admission and love ending in an unfinished sentence, and trusts you to feel which one is more alive.