Revision is normally something we do on purpose, with a pencil, at a desk. Dave Bonta's six-line poem turns that around: the revising happens to the speaker, not by him. "In the morning a new draft / of the lines in the body" suggests someone waking to find that something has been rewritten overnight, and that the manuscript is himself. The key phrase is "lines in the body." Lines are what a poet makes, but they are also what a body collects: creases at the eyes, the markings of a palm, veins under the skin. Bonta doesn't choose between these meanings. The body is both the text and the page it is written on. The title adds another layer, since "revision" comes from the Latin for "to see again," and the morning's first task is to look again at what the night has done.
The second couplet gives the speaker a role, and it is the role of a student. "I study hard to understand it" is the longest line in the poem, nine syllables against the others' six or seven, and it sounds like effort. Even the pronoun is slippery: "it" could be the new draft, the body, or the change itself. The speaker is a reader of his own life, working at comprehension like someone preparing for a test. Then comes the interruption: "but desire brings many hands." Study is solitary, while desire is plural. The word "hands" can mean touch, caresses, grasping, but it also has an old meaning in the world of manuscripts, where different "hands" in one document are different writers. Read that way, desire turns a single author into a crowd of editors, each leaving marks the speaker did not plan.
The last couplet loses control in a different way. "And more than I expected" starts with a conjunction, so the poem still seems to be mid-thought, and the phrase hangs loose. It might describe the number of hands, the strength of desire, or what follows. The final line, "the letters feast or fast," is the shortest in the poem and the most surprising. Letters are the raw material of writing, and here they take on appetite. They either gorge or go hungry. There is also a small joke inside the sound: "feast" is simply "fast" with an extra letter, so the line acts out what it says, one word fattened by an added "e." The poem uses "or" rather than "and," which suggests the rewriting does not move steadily toward improvement. It swings between excess and scarcity, with no comfortable middle.
The form supports this unsettled feeling. There are three unrhymed couplets, no punctuation, and no capital letters except the "I." Without a full stop, the poem never claims to be finished, and it reads like a draft of itself. The end-words don't rhyme in any traditional way, but "draft" in line one and "fast" in line six share a short vowel and a hard, clipped ending, so the poem is lightly framed by two blunt sounds. The vocabulary is plain and mostly short. Even the longest words, "understand" and "expected," belong to everyday speech. That plainness makes the strangeness of the central idea, a body that edits itself in its sleep, feel more believable. The pacing is calm at first ("in the morning") and tightens as it nears the end.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it compresses into so few words. It treats writing as something physical rather than purely mental, and it treats understanding as unfinished. The speaker studies hard, yet desire keeps adding new hands faster than he can read the old ones. For a student, that is a useful reminder that revising isn't only fixing mistakes. It can mean being changed by the thing you are working on. Because the poem ends without punctuation or a conclusion, you could also say it invites its own revision, with the reader as one more hand on the page.