Say "wild life" and most of us picture foxes and forests. Dave Bonta splits the word in two and hands the phrase back to human beings. In eight lines, with no punctuation at all, the poem suggests that wildness is not a place we visit but something already moving through us, as constant and as unscheduled as blood. Its central idea is that a truly wild life cannot be fenced in, dated or tidied up, and that it is both a little shameful and magnificent.
The opening couplet sets this up with a slightly puzzling grammar. "Like blood in the body" is a simile with nothing yet to compare, so it hangs in the air until the next line arrives: "I have no real birthday." The two lines can be read together, since blood circulates without a beginning or end and keeps no anniversaries. Life, on this view, is a continuous flow, not a series of dated milestones. The missing punctuation reinforces the point. Because nothing is closed off with a full stop, one statement runs into the next, as if the poem were circulating too.
The second couplet gives us the only real scene, and it is a very small one: "I see light go through the street / and dance as all men do." The syntax is deliciously loose. Who dances? The light might, or the speaker might, or both. The sentence will not decide, and that blur is the point: the watcher and the thing watched fall into the same movement. The phrase "as all men do" quietly widens the poem from "I" to everyone. Dancing is presented as a universal habit, as ordinary as walking down a street. The phrase is also old-fashioned in saying "men" for humanity, which gives the line a slightly proverbial ring, like something half-remembered.
The last two couplets move from observation to definition, though a very unusual one. "A wild life is whole / and wells up." The words "whole" and "wells" share their opening sound, so the idea of wholeness seems to bubble straight out of the verb. To "well up" is what springs do, and what tears and blood do when they rise to the surface. It is an image of pressure from within, not of something grabbed from outside. The shortest line in the poem, "and wells up," is its most physical, a small spurt.
Then comes the surprise: "like a Lent fling / abominable and rich." Lent is a season of restraint, so a fling during it is a stolen pleasure, a break from rules. Yet the poem does not excuse it. "Abominable" is a heavy, almost biblical word of disgust, and the poem sets it beside "rich" with a plain "and," as if both were simply true. The longest word in the poem lands in its final line and stretches it out, so that the last thing we feel is excess. There is also a quiet tension here. The speaker has no real birthday and lives outside the calendar, yet the closing image borrows a calendar season. Perhaps wildness only shows up as wildness against some background of rules, or perhaps the poem enjoys the paradox of a life beyond dates being described by a date-bound transgression. The poem does not say, which suits its refusal to explain itself.
The form is simple: four unrhymed couplets and short lines of roughly three to seven syllables. Rhyme is replaced by echoing sounds. Blood, body and birthday share a hard "b," which "abominable" picks up again at the end. Light, life, like, Lent and fling keep returning to an "l," a soft, liquid sound that fits all the talk of flowing and welling. The poem has no rhyme to tie it neatly shut, and it ends on "rich," not on a conclusion.
What makes it worth reading is that it shows a wild life without defining it. We get blood, a street full of light, a guilty indulgence, and three images that do not quite agree with one another. The poem trusts the reader to feel what links them: aliveness that cannot be contained, and that is hard to approve of and hard to resist.