Seven short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and yet the poem builds a whole small economy out of wages, business, time and a gift. In Dave Bonta's "Loner" the speaker is paid in ash and keeps company with solitude: "my being much alone." The second half then turns that bleak bargain into something closer to an apprenticeship. Being alone becomes a skill learned slowly, like a child's, and what it finally teaches is how to live in the present.
The opening image is carefully chosen. Ash is what remains after fire has finished, so wages paid in it are payment that cannot be spent, a reward for work that has burned away. It also carries a sense of mortality, and the word "wages" may recall the old saying that the wages of sin is death. The poem does not spell any of this out, and it doesn't need to. Ash is light, grey and final, and the speaker accepts it without complaint. Even the phrase "much alone" is slightly odd. We usually say "very alone" or "on my own a lot," but "much" turns loneliness into a quantity, something measured out and paid, which fits the language of money around it.
Notice, too, that the first stanza has no real verb. "Ash for my wages / my being much alone" simply names conditions, one after another, as if the speaker were describing a fixed state. Verbs only arrive in the second stanza, and they are "learn" and "will… be." Grammar moves from stillness to becoming, so the poem's form acts out the change it describes.
That change begins with a simile: "like any art that children learn." Children learn by repetition, absorption and clumsy practice, not by decree, and the comparison suggests that solitude is something to be practised before it is mastered. Because there is no punctuation, the line can also be read backwards across the gap: "my being much alone / like any art that children learn." On that reading, being alone is itself the art. The poem allows both meanings and commits to neither.
Then comes the claim: "the only business / of the heart will in time be / the present." "Business" answers "wages," so the money vocabulary returns, but now the heart's work is reduced to a single task. The word "only" matters. It is not love or ambition or even happiness, just presence. The phrase "in time" works twice, meaning both "eventually" and "within time itself," which is exactly where the present has to be found. The line break after "be" lets the word hang for a moment, so a reader can hear "will be… present" before the noun arrives. And "present" is also a gift, which quietly reverses the first line. The speaker was paid in ash, but what the solitude finally hands over is a present.
The poem's sound is quiet but attentive. Nothing rhymes, which suits a poem about being apart, and the lines shrink toward a closing phrase of only three syllables, "the present," that lands softly and stops. Yet small echoes sit inside the words themselves. "Learn" contains "earn," as though the wages from the first line were still there, and "heart" contains "art," just after the poem has talked about an art being learned. These may be accidents of English, but the reader can hear them, and they stitch the stanzas together without any rhyme.
The title is worth a pause. "Loner" is a label other people attach to someone, flat and a little dismissive. The poem answers it from the inside, replacing the noun with the gentler, more thoughtful "my being much alone."
What makes the poem significant is its honesty. It does not announce that solitude is wonderful. The heart's business "will in time be" the present, a future tense that promises without delivering, while the ash is still in the speaker's hands. In so few words, it offers a way of seeing loneliness as a slow education and not only a loss.