Mornings usually come with a moral attached: they are for getting up, getting on, getting things done. Dave Bonta's three-line "Proverbial (3)" begins by wrecking that idea. "I debauch the morning with a pen." Debauch is a word for wine, late nights and bad influence, and here the corrupting substance is ink. Writing is presented as a pleasure slightly beyond respectability, something done instead of the virtuous thing, and the morning, the most upright part of the day, is its victim. The line is also neatly built. It runs nine syllables with three strong beats (deBAUCH, MORNing, PEN), loosely iambic, and the hard, almost spat-out "bauch" in the middle makes the confession sound relished rather than guilty.
The second line turns from confession to advice, or something dressed as advice: "Who needs to think, find a garden." There is no question mark, and the missing punctuation lets the sentence split two ways. It can be a scornful rhetorical question ("Who needs to think?") followed by an order. It can also be a proverb in the old pattern, "Whoever needs to think, let him find a garden." The poem seems happy to leave both open. In the first reading, thinking is dismissed as overrated, and the garden is where you go instead, to dig, smell and look. In the second, the garden is the right place for thought, which suggests that real thinking happens sideways, among plants, not at a desk. Either way the garden stands for a slower, bodily kind of attention, and the faint echo between "pen" at the end of line one and "garden" at the end of line two ties the two pleasures together without making a formal rhyme.
The last line is the strangest: "On my flag: moon and money, our two hips." A flag is a public emblem, and this one is oddly private, with the colon setting out its contents like a heraldic description. The pronouns shift too, from "my" flag to "our two hips," as if the speaker has quietly brought the reader in. The items on the flag are a surprising pairing, moon and money. Both are round and shiny, one a coin and the other a disc in the sky. One governs tides and night, the other governs markets and days. The poem then calls them "our two hips," which makes them the twin joints on which a body swings and turns. It is a comic image, and a convincing one. The poem suggests that human life pivots between the unearthly pull of something like the moon (dream, desire, poetry) and the earthly pull of money (work, need, bargaining). We walk on both, and if either seizes up we limp. Sound reinforces this, since the m of "morning" comes back in "moon" and "money," and the short, clipped "hips" lands as a last comic thud after the long vowels of "moon."
What makes the poem interesting is how it handles the form its title promises. Proverbs are communal, compressed and authoritative, and they usually tell you what to do. Bonta's three lines have the compression but undercut the authority. The first is a personal admission, not a rule. The second is an instruction that may be a joke. The third is a coat of arms for a country of one. The numeral in the title suggests the poem belongs to a sequence of such pieces, though the text alone can't tell us more than that. The lines read as mock-proverbs that borrow the sound of wisdom while pushing it somewhere looser and more personal.
There is also a quiet argument beneath the humor. The speaker does not say that writing is useful, or that gardens are good for you. He claims an allegiance: to pleasure, to the unproductive hour, to a divided but honest idea of what moves us. The poem's brevity becomes part of the point, since it takes up almost no time and is a small morning's indulgence in itself. A reader who arrives expecting a lesson leaves with an attitude, which is arguably a more lasting thing to take from a proverb.