Dave Bonta's three-line poem never describes feeling anxious. The title supplies the clinical label, cool and medical, the kind of phrase you might find on a form at a doctor's office. Then the poem itself goes somewhere stranger and more domestic. There are no racing hearts or catastrophes, only a person sitting still with something unwelcome.
The first two lines carry the image: "all morning sitting with the bland / merchandise of night." The sentence has no subject. Nobody says "I sit"; there is only the participle "sitting," as if the self has gone missing and only the posture remains. "All morning" gives the scene a long, slow duration. "Sitting with" suggests the way one sits with a patient or a difficult guest, or waits in a shop with goods nobody wants. The line break matters too. "Bland" is left hanging at the end of line one, so for a moment it reads as a verdict on the morning itself, before "merchandise" turns it into a description of goods. The word is a surprising choice, since we expect anxiety to be sharp, jagged or loud. Here it is flat and mass-produced, the same stock delivered every night. "Merchandise" brings in the language of commerce, with wares, inventory and things bought and sold. Judging by the imagery, these may be the leftover thoughts of a sleepless night. The poem never names them, and that vagueness is part of its point, since the contents hardly matter when they are all equally dull and unavoidable.
Then comes the white space, and the poem's only "I": "I study arithmetic to see myself." The shop vocabulary quietly continues, because arithmetic is what you do with stock, tallying and counting what you have. The line can be read two ways. Counting may be a way of steadying the mind, a small orderly task to set against the mess of the night. Or it may suggest that anxiety is itself a kind of bad bookkeeping, a mind forever adding up risks and what-ifs. The verb "study" is a schoolroom word, implying patient attention to something elementary. The strangest move is the purpose clause, "to see myself." Arithmetic is not a mirror, yet here it is treated as one. The self appears only as something that can be worked out, reduced to figures. This is both consoling and slightly chilling.
Title and text pull against each other in a way that rewards a second look. "Disorder" names a lack of order, while arithmetic is the most orderly activity most of us ever learn. The poem sets one against the other, and the final line may be a quiet attempt to restore order. It does not say whether the attempt works.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation, not even a full stop at the end, so nothing is ever formally closed. The rhythm shifts from line to line. The first line is close to a steady four-beat pulse ("all MORNing SITting WITH the BLAND"), which feels like sitting still. The second shrinks to two heavy beats, "MERchandise of NIGHT," and drops like a weight onto the table. The third is the longest and runs on through the soft s-sounds of "study," "see" and "myself," as if the voice were slowly calming itself down. The last word is the reflexive pronoun "myself," placed where a reader expects a resolution. The self is the goal of the sentence and also the last thing we reach.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It avoids melodrama and treats anxiety as something closer to boredom, an ordinary morning's work. Its central metaphor, night as a seller of tedious goods, is odd enough to stick in the mind and exact enough to feel true. In under twenty words it suggests that the worst part of anxiety may be less terror than its dull, repetitive inventory, and that the effort to look at oneself clearly can start with something as humble as a sum. It also leaves the reader a question. Does the person in the poem see themselves, or only the numbers?