Breakfast is the meal that sets the day's timetable running, so it is a small act of rebellion to make the timetable itself the meal. In Dave Bonta's "Diet (2)", the speaker sits down "this morning" and eats a clock: its noise, its hands, even its cord. The speaker ends up neither stuffed nor sick, but quiet. The poem is only five short lines long, yet it holds a whole attitude toward time: the wish to stop being chased by it and take it in instead.
The title sets up a joke and then breaks it. A diet normally means restraint, a list of things refused. Here the regime is bizarrely, gleefully greedy, and what gets consumed is the thing that usually does the rationing, since we eat by the clock. The numeral in the title hints that this belongs to a sequence, but the poem needs no context to work. Its logic is dream logic delivered in a perfectly flat, matter-of-fact voice. "I eat the clock" is stated as casually as "I eat toast."
The items on the menu are chosen with care. "The din" is the first surprise, because noise is not food. Yet the word makes the clock ring and tick in our ears, and it suggests an alarm clock, the morning's most hated sound. Then come "the palpable hands." "Palpable" comes from a Latin root meaning to touch or stroke, and it is a startling word to attach to a clock's hands, which we normally only look at. Time, an invisible abstraction, suddenly has a body you can feel in your mouth. The hands might also faintly suggest human hands, though that is the reader's inference rather than anything the poem says. Next, "the cord and all" brings in an everyday idiom, the cheerful "and all" of someone who has swallowed the thing whole, wrapper included. The cord, presumably the clock's power lead, is the detail that gives the game away. The speaker is cutting off time at its source, unplugging it from the inside.
Then comes the poem's oddest phrase: "a brave cake." A clock face is round, so the cake makes visual sense, but "brave" belongs to people, not pastries. The adjective could describe the speaker, who has just done something absurdly courageous, or it could describe the meal's audacity. Either way it adds a note of mock-heroism, as though swallowing hours were a feat worth a medal. It also keeps the poem light. Without it, the lines might read as grim or anxious.
Sound quietly supports the sense. "Clock," "cord" and "cake" all begin with the same hard k sound, so the poem seems to tick faintly even as it devours the ticking. There is no rhyme and no punctuation. The double space in "the din the palpable hands" does the work of a comma, a tiny pause that lets each item register like a spoonful. The lowercase, unpunctuated lines feel casual and unhurried, and a poem about escaping the clock sensibly refuses to march in a metronomic beat. The rhythm is plain and speech-like, with short lines that nearly stop on their last word.
Then a blank line, one more pause, and the closing line: "and after that I am still." The word "still" carries the poem's whole payoff because it means two things at once. It means motionless and silent, as a stopped clock is, and as a mind is when the din has gone. It also means "yet" or "nevertheless": after consuming time, the speaker goes on existing. The two readings complete each other. Time has been swallowed, and what remains is a calm, continuing self.
That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. In a handful of words it turns a common modern complaint, being governed by the clock, into a small surreal comedy, and then lets the comedy settle into something close to peace. It does not explain itself or moralise. It simply serves up its odd meal and leaves the reader sitting in the silence afterward.