Five short lines, one sentence, and not a single mark of punctuation: Dave Bonta's poem reads like something muttered across a table late at night. Its speaker goes to the wine-house on a strange errand. He doesn't go to forget his fear of losing time, which is what we'd expect from a drinker. He goes "to know" it. Having looked at the fear, he sets himself a second task: "make an ordinary lay / a mad love." The central idea is that mortality, if you face it instead of dodging it, can be turned into intensity. The dread of time running out is the very thing that might lift a casual encounter into something wild and consuming.
The title adds a twist. "Cheating death" is a stock phrase for narrowly escaping it. Change one word and it becomes "cheating on death," as if death were a spouse we are bound to, and every pleasure were a small infidelity, a stolen hour. The joke is witty and slightly sinister. Notice, too, that the word death never appears in the poem's body. It lives only in the title, while the lines talk about "losing time." That is a clever sidestep. Death in the abstract is too large to look at, but lost time is something we feel hour by hour.
Several words pull double duty. "Know" carries an old biblical sense of intimacy, so knowing one's fear starts to sound like sleeping with it. "Lay" is the blunt modern word for a sexual partner or encounter, but it is also an old word for a short song or poem. Read that way, the last two lines become a statement about the poem itself, which is a small, plain lay of five lines. The verb "make" works the same way, since it recalls "make love" and also the poet as a maker. Whether or not Bonta intended all of this, the words make room for it.
The sound of the poem is quietly organised. There is no regular rhyme or meter, and the rhythm stays close to speech, with lines of roughly three beats. But "wine" and "time" share a long *i*, a near-rhyme that links the place of drinking to the thing being feared. This is also a small paradox, since wine is one of the things that makes hours vanish. The speaker seems to go looking for the fear in the place best designed to lose time. Another cluster of sounds comes late in the poem: "losing," "lay," "love." Three *l* words run through it, so that loss, sex and love seem to be one chain of feeling. The word "wine-house" itself is a little odd. It is hyphenated and faintly old-fashioned, and judging by the word choice, it gives the setting a timeless, storybook air rather than that of a particular modern bar.
The line breaks do careful work. "to know my fear" stops on "fear," letting it stand alone for a beat before "of losing time" defines it. Then "an ordinary lay" ends line four in a flat, deflating way, and the next line swerves: "a mad love." The two adjectives, "ordinary" and "mad," mark the distance the poem hopes to cover. The final line is the shortest, and its two heavy stresses sit side by side, so it lands like a closing door. The grammar adds to the effect. The poem says "make X Y" and not "turn X into Y." There is no "into," and no account of how the change happens. It is announced like a conjuring trick.
It is also worth noticing that the poem never says the trick works. Everything hangs on "to": the speaker goes *to* know, *to* make. The poem ends on intention and not on result, so the mad love stays a hope, which keeps the tone honest and a little vulnerable.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. The old idea that we should seize the day because we will die is compressed into a single breath, and it is treated with both humor and seriousness. The cheeky, almost crude "lay" sits beside the grand "mad love" without apology, and the contrast keeps the poem from sounding sentimental. In the end it suggests that fear need not be a reason to hide. The speaker uses it as fuel.