Six lines, three couplets, and the poem has already broken two rules of ordinary sense: things talk, and flowers pay the sea. Dave Bonta's "Time Lapse" explains neither. It announces a morning in which the world has turned chatty, then lets its logic slide a little further with each line.
The opening is deliberately plain. "This morning, all things / talk to me" uses short, everyday words, yet the claim is enormous: not some things, but *all* things. The idea of a world that speaks to us is an old one, but there is no rapture here, only a flat, almost conversational report. The line break helps. "All things" hangs for a beat before the verb arrives, so for a moment the reader sees the whole crowd of objects waiting to speak. The poem never says what they say. Judging by how strange the remaining lines are, they may be the things' words, overheard in fragments.
The second couplet turns the speaker into a traveller. "I get one inch / in the coach to white noon." The verb "get" makes progress sound rationed, like a seat or an allowance, and the unit is comically small. An inch is how you measure a crack in a wall, not a journey. Yet the destination is "white noon," a time treated as a place you can ride toward. Space and time have swapped jobs. The phrase also seems to echo "white noise," with one vowel bent. Noon becomes a bleached, humming blankness, the hour when the sun is highest and colour washes out.
The last couplet is the oddest. The sentence flows across the stanza break, so "white noon" turns into somewhere with a landscape: "where the famous asters / pay the sea two days." Asters take their name from the Greek word for "star," and the flowers are star-shaped, so the image may hold stars and blossoms at once. Calling them "famous" is funny and unexpected, as if flowers could be celebrities or the subject of gossip. Then comes the transaction. Days are handed over like coins, and the sea is the creditor. One reading is that beauty has a price, paid in time, and that blooming costs the flower its days. The poem doesn't confirm this, and the strength of the line is that it won't settle into one meaning.
The title explains the method. A time-lapse photograph squeezes hours into seconds, and the poem does the same: a morning crosses to noon in the space of two couplets, and a single inch somehow contains two whole days. But "lapse" also means a slip or a gap. The poem is full of small gaps in logic, and the reader is meant to fall through them. Both senses fit a text that moves quickly and leaves things out.
Formally, there is no rhyme and no fixed metre. The lines are short, between three and six syllables, and built mostly from single-syllable words. That makes the heavy stresses pile up in "white noon" and "two days," where two strong beats land side by side and slow the line down. Even so, the poem has sound-patterns. "Me" in line two is answered by "sea" in the last line, so the poem begins and ends on the same long vowel. "Noon" and "two" share a vowel, and "pay" and "days" chime inside a single line. These echoes are quiet, but they give a loose, dreamlike text some structure to hold on to.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of so little. It has no argument or story, only a few images set side by side, and it trusts the collision between them to do the work. In that sense, the speaker's opening claim becomes true for the reader as well. For these six lines, the words are the things that talk to us. Whether or not you decode "pay the sea two days," you come away with a feeling of time stretched and compressed, a morning that has gone strange and bright and slightly out of reach.