Dave Bonta's "Seaside holiday" turns the idea of escape upside down. The poem opens with the office as a "prison" that we "promise to go to," as if confinement were something we agree to, even look forward to. The holiday in the title never arrives. The sea shows up only as a puzzle: the speaker doesn't know "where I am with the sea," which suggests a person who can't tell how to relate to something open and vast.
What follows is routine. The speaker walks the street "to show myself among neighbors," talks about ways to make a little money, and touches only things "of our own manufacture." The speaker seems to be acting out a role rather than living freely. The final image, "writing in a journal with no self," sums it up neatly: lots of activity, but nobody really at home inside it. The mood is flat, quietly uneasy, and gently ironic, the feeling of being on holiday from yourself.