Anyone who has lain awake at three in the morning knows the nagging sense that the night is being wasted. Dave Bonta's six-line poem answers that feeling with a trick: it turns the wasted hours into a schedule. Waking, snacking, reading and writing are all lined up like errands for the day ahead. The central idea is that insomnia can be managed, even enjoyed, if you stop fighting it and give it a programme. The final line shows how fragile that plan is.
The form does most of the work. The title promises a to-do list, and the poem behaves like one. Every line is a short command and every line ends in a full stop, so each reads like a box ticked. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm is plain and clipped, built from small, mostly one-syllable words: "Wake in the night", "Read and be happy". That plainness suits the hour, when thinking is slow and sentences shrink. The tone is calm, even cheerful, and the cheerfulness is the poem's joke. Nobody schedules waking up, and the insomniac is the one person who never needs to.
Notice also who is missing. A list of instructions to oneself should have an "I" in it, but the speaker doesn't appear until the last line, and then only as the object of a wish: "myself". Until then the verbs march along without anyone behind them. That gives the first five lines a slightly mechanical, sleepwalking quality, as if the night were issuing orders and the speaker simply obeyed.
The imagery is small and sensory, and it leans toward comfort. Chocolate is a warm, midnight treat, the opposite of the sensible glass of water. "Read and be happy" is the one place where feeling enters, and it arrives as an instruction, which is both funny and touching, since happiness is not something you can usually order yourself to have. The word "order" returns in the fourth line with a nice double meaning: "Order a fat lie and write about it." It sounds like a request made across a café counter, and it also sounds like a command. The "fat lie" echoes the richness of the chocolate, so fiction becomes another indulgence. Judging by the phrasing, the "lie" may be a made-up story, or perhaps the poem itself, a pleasant untruth the sleepless mind cooks up while the body should be resting. Either way, writing is presented as appetite, not duty.
Two lines open up the space around the speaker. "Settle next door" is deliberately odd. "Settle" is a verb we usually link with sleep, with sinking into a bed or a house going quiet, yet here it means moving to another room. The speaker has quietly left the bed behind. Then comes "Hear the noise of other works." The word "works" is slippery. It could mean books and other people's writing, or it could mean the machinery and creaks of a house at night. Both readings fit: in the dark small sounds seem enormous, and the speaker's own reading and writing take place among all that sound. The phrase is open enough to hold both.
The last line changes the list. "Wish myself not to see the bed" is the first item that cannot really be done by effort. The earlier tasks, such as drinking, settling, reading and ordering, are all actions. This one is only a wish, and what it wishes for is a kind of blindness: to stop noticing the one object that reminds the speaker of failure. The bed has been avoided all through the poem, and now it is named. The cheerful productivity of the list turns out to be a way of not looking at it. The poem hints that sleep is the one thing you can't put on a list, because trying to do it prevents it.
That is what makes this tiny poem worth reading. In six lines it captures a familiar, slightly embarrassing experience, and it does so without self-pity. It is funny, and then it is quietly sad. It also shows how much a poem can do with a borrowed everyday form. The humble to-do list, usually the least literary kind of writing, ends up holding a whole mood: restlessness, small pleasures, and the stubborn hope of sleep.