Six short lines, no punctuation after the first stanza, and a title that sounds like it belongs on a pharmacy shelf. Dave Bonta's "Cure for neuroses" is tiny, but it makes a surprising claim: the remedy for an overworked mind is not better thinking but a kind of gentle disappearance.
The first stanza reports on a bad day. "My thinking, sick / and sorry all day, / cleared at night." The grammar does some quiet work here. The sentence's subject, "thinking," is followed by two lines of description, and its verb, "cleared," doesn't arrive until the last line of the stanza. The reader has to sit through the sickness before the relief comes, much as the speaker did. When it comes, it is a short line of only three syllables, and the relief feels abrupt and light. "Cleared" is also a nicely loose word. It suggests weather lifting, a table being cleared, even a person being cleared of blame. "Sick and sorry" works similarly. It describes illness, but "sorry" also carries regret and self-pity, so the speaker's thoughts sound both unwell and apologetic, as though the mind spent the day feeling guilty for existing. Notice, too, that the day is the sickness and the night is the cure. Daylight, usually a symbol of clarity, here belongs to confusion.
The second stanza changes mood completely. The report in the past tense becomes a request in the present: "Tell me my name / and put me / out of mind." The speaker never says who is being addressed. It could be a lover, a god, sleep itself, or simply the dark. That vagueness helps. The request is for someone, anyone, to take over the work the speaker's own mind has failed at.
The request is oddly double. First the speaker asks to be told their name, as if identity had slipped away overnight, the way it can in the moment before sleep. Then comes the opposite wish, to be "put out of mind." The phrase is a pun. To put something out of mind is to forget it, but it also echoes "out of my mind," the idiom for madness, and "put me out" calls up putting out a light or a fire. So the speaker wants to be named and then switched off. The title's joke becomes clear. Neuroses are a sickness of the mind, so the cure is to leave the mind behind. The line break after "put me" lets the phrase hang for a second, almost like being set down or tucked in, before "out of mind" finishes the thought.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, just lines of three to five syllables that read like breaths. What does repeat is the first person: "my," "my," "me," "me," and finally "mind." The soft m sounds run through the poem like a hum. It is a clever irony that a poem about escaping the self is so saturated with it. The self is the thing that needs curing, yet it is the only thing the poem can talk about. The one hard, crisp sound comes in "sick" and "thinking," where the k seems to catch, and then the poem relaxes into the open vowels of "night," "name," and "mind."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. It does not describe the neuroses, explain their cause, or promise a happy ending. Its image of recovery is not triumph but surrender: not "I figured it out" but "tell me who I am, then let me go." Many people know the feeling of lying awake while the mind circles, or of waking with it finally quiet, and the poem catches that relief in a handful of words. It also gently questions the idea that more self-examination is always the answer. Sometimes the healthiest thing a mind can do is be put out for the night.