The poem never mentions a coffin or a grave. The title does that work alone, and once we have read "Buried alive," every line feels like pressure from a lid. Dave Bonta gives us six lines in three unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters except one. That exception is the word "I," a small, stubborn self standing upright in a text that otherwise lies flat.
The first couplet is the most abstract: "on the wheel of occasions / I am denied liberty." A wheel can be many things. It might be the wheel of fortune, a hamster's wheel, or the old torture device that broke its victims. All of these turn without getting anywhere, and "occasions" fits that meaning. Birthdays, ceremonies, obligations and funerals come round again and again, and the speaker is fixed to them. "Denied liberty" sounds like the language of a court or a prison, so the clerical phrase makes the confinement feel official, as if it were a sentence passed on the speaker.
Then the poem turns concrete, and strange. "A priest officiating in a cubical / not one little door." The priest is the figure who would normally conduct a burial, but here he performs his rites inside the enclosure. The word "cubical" is odd. Strictly it is an adjective meaning cube-shaped, so using it as a noun gives us a room reduced to pure geometry. It also sounds like "cubicle," so the judging-by-the-sound inference is that the sealed box carries a faint echo of office life, with its partitions and its sameness. I read this as a deliberate overlap rather than an accident, though the poem does not confirm it. The line break also leaves the syntax loose. Is the cubical the thing with no door, or is "not one little door" a separate complaint? Either way, the effect is the same. The word "little" is the most human note in the poem. It sounds like a child's bargaining or a plea: not a grand exit, just a small one.
The last couplet brings the surprise: "and no mind to play cards / with a root." The opening "and" makes it feel like another item in a list of grievances. "No mind" can be read in two ways. It may mean "no inclination," as in "I have no mind to do it," or it may mean the mind itself is gone. The root is the only company available underground, and the speaker declines the game. Playing cards needs a partner, and the root is a poor one, silent and rooted in place. It is also faintly comic, and the humour makes the situation darker. The speaker will not make friends with the dark or settle into the grave's routines. Refusing the card game is a way of staying alive, a last act of stubbornness.
Notice also the direction the poem travels. It begins in abstractions ("occasions," "liberty"), moves to a person and a room (priest, cubical), and ends on small physical things (cards, a root). The poem descends, and its last word is a piece of the earth. The shift from idea to object mirrors the burial itself, and it makes the reader feel the ground closing in.
The sound work is quiet but effective. The first lines roll along on soft sounds: "wheel," "liberty," "little," "play." The l-sounds seem to turn like the wheel itself. Then "not one little door" lands as five short, nearly equal syllables, each as heavy as a knock on a wall. There is no rhyme to give comfort or closure, so the poem simply stops, as if cut off by the lid.
The poem is significant because it works as both nightmare and metaphor. Read literally, it is a scene of being sealed in with a priest and a root. Read figuratively, it is about how ritual, routine and ceremony can bury a person who is still breathing. Bonta does not explain this. He gives us the title, a few exact images and one bleakly funny refusal, and leaves us inside the box with the speaker, looking for a door.