Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to take a reader from Eden to the sickbed. The poem is called "Escapist," and it tells the story of an escape and its price. The speaker finds "a garden in my mind," enjoys "good company," and stays so long that his body rebels. The central idea is that retreat into the mind is never free. However pleasant the inner world is, the person who visits it still has a stomach and a bladder, and they will report back.
The opening line is the most conventionally "poetic" thing here. "I found a garden in my mind" falls into a smooth, almost perfect rhythm of four stresses, the kind of line a hymn or a ballad might open with. A garden is also one of the oldest images of refuge and innocence, so the line promises peace. The verb "found" suggests the garden turns up by accident, a gift rather than a plan. The second line, "and good company," is shorter and plainer. It never says who the company is, whether remembered friends, imagined ones or something more like a mood, and that vagueness lets the reader fill the garden with their own favourite escape.
Then the poem turns on the smallest of words. "I stayed there / till I was ill and vomited." The line break after "there" lets the sentence linger comfortably, as the speaker did, before "till" cuts it off. The garden has no gate and nobody asks him to leave, so the only limit is the body's. The wording is blunt: "ill" and "vomited" are ordinary words, and "vomited" is oddly formal and clumsy beside them. It might be a hangover, an overindulgence or something else, since the poem never names the cause. Because the garden sits so close to this sickness, it begins to look less like a paradise and more like a feast eaten past the point of enjoyment. That is an inference from the sequence of events, not something the poem states, but the logic of "stayed… till" supports it.
The rhythm falls apart along with the speaker. After that tidy first line, the lines shrink and stumble: "I stayed there" has only three syllables, and the last two lines wander in uneven lengths. Three lines begin with "and," which gives the ending a flat, listing quality, like a patient reciting symptoms. The speaker doesn't explain or complain, and he draws no moral. That deadpan tone is a large part of the poem's humour.
The last line is where the poem's language drops lowest: "and had pain in pissing." Here the plain, Anglo-Saxon words clash with the garden, and the repeated "p" sounds in "pain" and "pissing" make the line sound almost spat out. It is funny, but also uncomfortably honest, and the phrasing is awkward in a way that feels true to someone describing real discomfort. Just before it, "in the morning got cold" turns the time of day into a verdict. Morning light and cold bring the speaker back to reality, as a fantasy usually ends when the sun comes up. The word "cold" also hints at the loss of the garden's warmth, and the poem leaves it there without comment.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It shows the gap between the mind and the body, between what we imagine and what we have to live in. It also treats the old, flattering picture of the escapist, the dreamer in a garden, with gentle mockery, and it includes the speaker in the joke. Nothing in the poem says the escape wasn't worth it, since the company really was "good." But by refusing to tidy up the aftermath, it suggests that any retreat, however sweet, is borrowed time, and that the bill arrives in the morning.