Six short lines, barely thirty words, and Dave Bonta turns one sleepless night into a small catastrophe of time. A speaker sits up drinking, lies awake alone, and carries inside him a future that has been handed to somebody else. Nothing is explained. There is no name, no quarrel, no story of what went wrong. The poem's central idea is that separation is a loss of the present and also of the days still to come. "Apart" is the title, and the poem shows what being apart does to a person's sense of time.
The opening lines set up that disorientation. "I go by the clock below, / rising in the west." We usually steer by things that are dependable, and the sun rises in the east. Here the speaker's guide is placed "below" and rises in the wrong direction. The poem never says what this clock is, so a reader can only infer from the strangeness that the usual measures of time have stopped working. "Go by" does double duty. It means to rely on something, and it also means to pass, as hours go by. The speaker is following a timekeeper that doesn't keep time in any sense that helps him, while the night slips past regardless.
The sound of the poem adds to this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, though line 1 comes close to a steady beat: *I GO by the CLOCK beLOW*. After that the rhythm loosens, and the lines are short, plain and mostly monosyllabic. What does recur is the long "o": "go," "below," "morrow," "another," "alone." It runs through the poem like a hollow note, and the vowel is close to a moan. Even "morrow" and "another," which don't rhyme, share a soft trailing sound that links them. That is fitting, because one is the thing lost and the other is the person who now has it.
The centre of the poem is the two lines that don't begin with "I": "Within me, a morrow / given up to another." Two word choices matter here. "Morrow" is an old-fashioned word, softer and more formal than "tomorrow," and it makes the future sound like something promised or inherited. It also sits "within me," so the future is pictured as something carried in the body, as the drink is. The speaker has taken the night inside him twice over, once as liquor and once as grief. Then comes the passive phrase "given up." It doesn't say who gave it up. Did the speaker surrender his tomorrow, or was it taken from him? The grammar leaves both possibilities open, and that fits a mind too tired or too hurt to assign blame. "Another" is equally unnamed. It could be a rival, a lover, or simply someone who is not here. Because the person is left blank, the reader feels the absence more than the identity.
The frame around this centre does a lot of work. Lines 3 and 6 are almost twins: "I drink all night" and "I lie alone all night." Together with the opening "I go," they make "I" the start of three of the six lines, as though the speaker can't get outside himself. But the repeated line changes. Drinking is an action, a way of trying to fill the time. By the end it has become "lie alone," which is passive and stripped of any distraction. The line is also a syllable longer than its earlier version, so the night stretches a little as the poem closes. Nothing has been resolved between the two statements. The night has only deepened after the poem's one glimpse of what the speaker has lost.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy and how much it leaves unsaid. A longer poem might explain the break-up and let the speaker complain. This one trusts a few details to carry the feeling: a clock that points the wrong way, a drink, a borrowed old word for the future, and a person who stays nameless. It also suggests that loneliness is about time as much as space. The speaker is apart from someone, but he is also cut off from his own tomorrow, and when the night ends there is no morning waiting for him.