A single slash does a great deal of work in this title. Read straight through, "In/formal" is just "informal", the word for slippers, first names and easy chat. Pause at the slash and it becomes "in formal": inside ceremony, inside rank. Dave Bonta's four-line poem lives in the gap between those two readings. What it says about that gap is funny and quietly serious. The speaker gives the dog and the king the same kind of talk, and the place where he does it is private.
The grammar is worth a slow look. He talks *with* his dog but *to* the king. "With" suggests a shared exchange between near-equals, while "to" points upward at someone being addressed. So the speaker's grammar still remembers the hierarchy even as the setting erases it. Notice too that the poem says "where", not "as" or "like". It is not a simile that compares the dog to the king. It is a statement about location: one spot, two listeners. The poem never says who the king is. He could be a literal ruler, but the nighttime, whispered setting nudges the reading toward some higher authority, perhaps God (that is an inference, and the poem leaves it open). Either way, the dog and the king sit at opposite ends of a social scale, one at the bottom of the household and the other at the top of the realm, and both receive the same hush.
The construction is as spare as the idea. There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is that of speech rather than song. The two opening lines are the longest, and the colon after "king" works like a lowered voice, promising an answer. What follows is two fragments instead of a finished sentence. That suits a poem about informality, because the grammar loosens at the exact moment the subject turns private. The repeated "talk" is the poem's one strong sound anchor. It appears twice, only a line apart, which makes the two kinds of conversation feel like a single habit.
The vocabulary is almost entirely plain, one-syllable stuff: *talk, dog, king, home, bed*. Against that, "privately" stands out as the longest and most Latinate word in the poem. Bonta isolates it on a line of its own, and the isolation does what the word says. The word sits alone, with white space around it, like a closed door. It is also the only word that answers *how* rather than *who* or *where*, and it quietly makes the central claim: what matters about these conversations is their manner, not their audience.
The last line, "Between home and bed", is the most intriguing image. Logically, bed is part of home, so the phrase shouldn't describe a gap at all. Yet we feel the gap at once: the last stretch of the evening, a hallway or staircase or final walk (judging by the imagery, though the poem never specifies). It is a threshold, a time as much as a place, when the day's public self is put down. Many people talk to themselves, to a pet or to a higher power in exactly that interval, and the poem catches the habit without describing a single word that is said. Withholding the content keeps the privacy intact. We get the setting of the confidence and not the confidence itself, so the poem behaves like the secret it describes.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. It flattens a social ladder in two lines without a lecture. It is also deliberately double-edged, because the reader has to decide which way the levelling runs. Either the dog is raised to the dignity of a king's confidant, or the king is lowered to the level of a household pet. Both readings are available, and both are a little comic and a little tender. Behind the joke is a serious point: the way we speak when no one is watching may be the most honest register we have. A poem that fits in four lines and a title with a slash in it manages to suggest that formality is something we perform, and that privacy is where it ends.