A model citizen is supposed to be someone who follows the rules, keeps out of trouble and fits in with the community. Dave Bonta's five-line poem puts that phrase next to a gallows and lets the discomfort build. The speaker is not a hangman or even a cheering spectator. He is a bystander who asks for instructions on how to stand there and feel as little as possible.
The first stanza is the harder one, because its grammar slips. "tell me / which neither denied nor affirmed hit / not to see" can be read in several ways, and none is fully stable. One reading is: tell me which of them, neither denying nor affirming it, chose not to see. The word "hit" is odd. It may be a slip for "it", but as it stands it is a blunt, violent monosyllable that jolts the sentence just as it should be moving smoothly. I can't say whether the oddity is deliberate, but the effect is the same: we stumble on the very line that is about refusing to look. The key phrase, "neither denied nor affirmed", describes the stance of the person who never says yes to an atrocity and never says no. This is the silence of someone who isn't technically guilty of anything. The poem suggests that this neutrality is what makes someone a "model" citizen, because the system needs people who do not object.
The second stanza turns from this moral fog to something almost practical. "which good times to bring myself / to think of at a public hanging" sounds like a question about coping, as if a hanging were a dentist's appointment and the problem were how to distract oneself. The phrase "bring myself" suggests effort and a slight reluctance, as though the speaker has to coax his own mind away from what is in front of him. "Good times" is deliberately childlike and ordinary. It sets pleasant, private memories against a public execution, and the poem suggests that this is how looking away works. People don't need to approve of cruelty. They only need to find somewhere comfortable to put their attention.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme scheme and no punctuation, and everything is lowercase, so the lines read less like a finished statement than like a voice trailing off. Two questions begin with "which", and the repetition gives them the feel of a multiple-choice form, with the speaker waiting for an authority to tick the right box. Both "tell me" and the question marks it implies are absent from the page, so the requests have no terminal punctuation to close them. That leaves the speaker's request hanging in the air, which is an unsettling pun on where the poem ends.
Sound and rhythm do quiet work. The first stanza ends on "not to see", three light syllables that close like eyelids, and it faintly echoes "me" in the opening line, so the speaker's wish for guidance and his wish for blindness are tied together. The second stanza's lines are longer and more even, with the flat, reasonable tone of someone asking directions. That calm is the horror: the more matter-of-fact the voice sounds, the more clearly it shows how complicity can be made to seem reasonable. The hard consonants and short vowels of "hit", "think" and "hanging" also echo each other, so violence runs through the lines without being described. The poem never shows a body, a crowd or a rope, only "a public hanging", named once, at the very end.
That placement is the poem's smartest decision. The final word arrives with no full stop and no consoling image after it, so the reader is left facing the event the speaker is trying to avoid. The title does similar work from the other end. "Model citizen" first reads as praise and then, by the last line, as an accusation. The poem is significant because it is so short and still manages to implicate its reader. It never says that watching is wrong or that looking away is worse. It simply lets a polite, reasonable voice ask how to get through the moment, and we recognize how easily that voice could be our own.