Dave Bonta needs only five lines to stage a departure. A speaker announces that he has made himself a pair, then sets out on a journey with two companions: a clock and a corpse. The central idea is that mortality is not something waiting at the end of the road. It comes along from the start, and its company sharpens the appetite for life instead of dulling it.
The arithmetic is worth a second look. "I made myself a pair" promises two, but the next lines deliver "my clock and I, / my corpse and I," which puts the speaker in each pairing and makes a small crowd of the sentence. One reading is that the self has been split. There is the living "I," and there is the self as measured by time (the clock) and the self as it will finally be (the corpse). The two companions work like a before-and-after: the clock is time passing, the corpse is time finished. The word "made" matters here. Nobody forces this company on the speaker. He builds it deliberately, as if the awareness of death were something one could choose to assemble and carry.
The title adds another layer. "Bilateral" suggests two sides, as in a body with matching halves or an agreement between two parties. The poem is itself built symmetrically. Lines two and three are near mirror images, differing by a single word, and the swap from "clock" to "corpse" is also a sound-play. Both words begin with a hard *k*, so they sit close in the ear even though one is a machine and the other is a body. The repeated "my" claims both as possessions, and the repeated "I" at the end of each line makes the speaker a kind of hinge between them. Line one sets the scene, the two matched lines hold the balance, and the last two lines move off.
The rhythm supports this. The poem is in free verse, with lines of four to six syllables, and nothing is padded. A colon after "pair" works like a drum-roll, and then the short lines tick along almost like the clock they name. There is no end rhyme in the usual sense. Rhyme appears instead as repetition, in the doubled "and I." That fits a poem about sameness and doubling, and it keeps the tone plain and conversational.
The last two lines carry the most surprise. "Set forth" is slightly old-fashioned, the language of voyages and quests, and it dresses an ordinary day's outing as an expedition. "Together" insists on companionship, which is odd given who the companions are. Then comes "greedy to see." Greed is usually a fault, but here it is an energy. Greed also belongs to the body, and the corpse is the one companion that will never see anything again. That tension is the poem's quiet joke. The speaker takes his own death along as a travelling companion and seems to look twice as hard because of it. The phrase is also open-ended: "to see" can mean to take in the world, or to find out what happens, so the hunger might be for sights or for the ending itself. Because the poem stops on the long, open "ee" of "see," the question is left hanging.
Its significance lies in how much of an old idea it fits into so little space. Poets have long reminded readers that they will die, but this poem avoids gloom and moralising. It treats mortality with dry, almost cheerful wit. The clock and corpse are not enemies to be fought off or feared. They are fellow travellers, and the speaker shows no dread, only curiosity. By the end, the grim pair has become a reason for the speaker to look harder at everything, and that reversal is what a reader remembers.