Seven short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to turn the idea of being alive upside down. The title, "Among the living," sounds like a plain description of where we all are. By the end it has become a question: who actually counts as living? The poem's answer is not the people at their desks. It is the dead and the mad.
The first stanza opens with a shrug disguised as a proverb: "Rot is rot." The tautology says there is no point arguing about it. Then the colon sets up an equation, and the two things on either side of it should not match. One is "full satisfaction," which makes decay sound like a ripe, completed thing, the way a fallen fruit has finished what it set out to do. The other is "the afternoon lull / at the office." The poem treats both as rot, and the comparison is quietly unflattering to the office. Natural decay at least arrives at fullness. The lull is rot with no satisfaction in it, a slow going-off of the hours. Readers who know the British sense of "rot" as nonsense may also hear a second joke here, since the office lull can be both decay and rubbish.
Sound supports the equation. "Full" and "lull" are not a perfect rhyme, but they echo each other closely. Fullness and emptiness end up sounding like the same thing, which is what the sentence claims. The rhythm of the stanza also drains away as it goes. "Rot is rot" is blunt and heavy, "afternoon lull" stretches out sleepily, and the stanza ends on the flat, administrative "at the office." The line sits there as inertly as the afternoon it describes.
The second stanza begins with "So," as though a conclusion followed from that odd equation. It does, in the poem's own logic. If life among the living can be a kind of rot, then go somewhere else for life. The advice is to "write letters," and the choice of form matters. A letter is slow and deliberate, and it is a way of paying attention. It is the opposite of the office lull, which is pure distraction. A letter also expects a reply it may never get, and the recipients here are "the dead and the mad," two groups that cannot answer in the ordinary way. The poem does not pity them. It simply prefers them.
The key move is the verb in "They live all within / a door or two." After a title and a first stanza that treat "living" as a doubtful status, the poem hands the word to the dead and the mad. The line break after "within" works well, because the reader is briefly held inside something before the line lets go. Then comes the offhand, almost neighborly "a door or two," the language of someone pointing down the hall. The poem does not say whether these doors are real rooms, memories, or the thresholds of other states of mind. Judging by the imagery, though, the point is nearness. What is truly alive, the poem suggests, is not remote or exotic. It is close enough to knock on, and it is easy to ignore.
The poem has no regular meter and no end-rhyme. The lines are short and conversational, and the wit is deadpan. That plainness is part of the argument. Nothing in the language is inflated, so the claims land with the calm of something obvious, and the reader is more likely to accept them. The grammar is also mostly imperative. Apart from the opening tautology, the poem gives orders rather than describing, which makes the last stanza sound like practical advice for getting through a Tuesday afternoon.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries in so little space. It questions what we mean by "alive" and mocks the dull routines of ordinary working life, and it still manages to be gently funny. It also leaves a small, odd task with the reader: to think of someone dead or unreachable, and to write to them anyway.