Most resolutions are promises to become more: fitter, calmer, more productive. Dave Bonta's seven-line "Resolutions" goes the other way. Its speaker is worn out by the self and decides to do less: to sit, to step aside, to come apart.
The poem opens on a contradiction: "I stay, I cannot stay / in my own head." The comma splits the sentence into a claim and its denial. The line break matters too. At the end of line one, "I cannot stay" reads as a complete admission of restlessness, and only then does "in my own head" say where the trouble lies. The head becomes a room the speaker keeps living in but cannot bear to remain in. That is a familiar feeling, the mind that will not stop talking to itself, compressed into a dozen syllables.
Then comes the poem's boldest move: "I have made more light / than the Lord." The line echoes the Genesis image of God creating light, and the speaker claims to have outdone it. The tone is hard to pin down. It could be pride, or it could be a joke at the speaker's own expense. Light is normally a blessing, but here it reads like overproduction, a mind so lit up with thoughts and self-regard that it can't rest. The line break helps the irony. "Than the Lord" sits alone on a three-syllable line, and the grand comparison is almost swallowed by the white space around it, as if the speaker winced after saying it.
The last three lines turn on the word "resolve," which appears twice and is also half-present in the title. In everyday use it means to decide, but it comes from a Latin verb meaning to loosen or release, and the poem seems to use both senses at once. This is why "resolve" and "be undone" can sit in the same sentence without clashing: to resolve, in the older sense, is already to undo. The speaker's determination is a determination to dissolve. The same word works in other directions as well. A problem is resolved when its tension is released, and a blurry image is resolved when it comes into focus, which suits a poem so full of light.
The grammar enacts the surrender. Having begun with the crowded "I" of the opening lines, the speaker lets the sentence run on through plain, stacked clauses: "and resolve to sit / and resolve to make way / and be undone." Each "and" adds a step, but each step involves less doing than the one before. Sitting is a minimal action. "Make way" means to step aside so that something else can pass, though the poem never says what. It might be the light, the Lord, or simply whatever the self has been blocking. "Be undone" is passive, so the speaker no longer acts at all. The final line has no full stop, so the poem seems to leave its own sentence loosened at the end.
Sound and rhythm are just as spare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run from three to six syllables, and most of the words are one syllable long, like speech with the padding taken out. Yet the poem doesn't fall apart. "Stay" in the first line is answered by "way" near the end, and "made" and "make" share their long vowel, so the sound circles back even as the sense lets go. "Undone" carries the poem's final double edge, since to be undone can mean to be ruined or to be freed. The poem never says which, and that uncertainty keeps it from settling into either despair or easy serenity.
What makes "Resolutions" worth reading is how much it fits into so little space: religious grandeur, self-mockery, and something like a spiritual practice, all in seven lines. It takes the New Year habit of self-improvement and turns it inside out, so that the best resolution is the one that lets the self go quiet.