Five short lines hold a whole argument about modern life. Dave Bonta's "Cutting back" opens with a question that never gets its question mark ("where in the geography / of busy people's prayers / to find ease") and closes with a vow that sounds like an answer but isn't one: "I shall continue saving time / that self-razor." The poem is about a trap. The more carefully we economise our hours, the less of ourselves is left to enjoy them.
Start with the title. "Cutting back" is the language of budgets, diets and pruning, where trimming is supposed to make something leaner and healthier. The final two words turn that idea around. A razor is the tool that does the cutting, so calling time-saving a "self-razor" suggests that what gets cut is the self. The compound is the poem's one real invention, and it works because it can be read two ways at once: a razor the self wields, or a razor that shaves the self away. Grammatically, "that self-razor" trails off from "saving time" like an afterthought, as if the speaker only hears what he has said once the phrase is out.
The first stanza is built on an odd metaphor. "Geography" is a word for maps, borders and terrain, yet here it is applied to prayers, which have no territory. The speaker treats the prayers of busy people as a landscape in which ease might be located, like a village he cannot find on the map. The phrase "busy people's prayers" also suggests that even the act of praying has been squeezed into a crowded schedule. Ease is not offered in those prayers; it has to be hunted for. Because there is no question mark and no capital letter, the question never quite demands an answer. It wanders, a thought half-spoken. The line that holds the thing wanted, "to find ease," is the shortest of the three, a small clearing in a stanza that has just rolled through the long, stately word "geography."
The second stanza answers with a change of register. "Shall" belongs to vows and prayer books, so the speaker's resolution borrows the sound of the very prayers he has just been asking about. "Continue" admits that this is already a habit, not a fresh decision. And "saving" has an older, religious meaning too, as in saving souls, so the phrase quietly mixes the economy of minutes with the economy of salvation. That double meaning is an inference, but the prayers in the first stanza make it hard to ignore. Notice also where "I" first appears: not until line four, after the impersonal "busy people." The speaker doesn't stand above the crowd. He joins it, and the tone is dry and rueful rather than preachy.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, but the poem is not without music. The sound /z/ buzzes through "busy," "people's," "prayers," "ease" and "razor," a faint hum like a diary filling up. It also ties together the thing the speaker wants and the thing that keeps it from him, since "ease" and "razor" end on the same sound. The line lengths do similar work. The second stanza begins with a steady, businesslike line of eight syllables, then snaps off into a four-syllable fragment. There is no closing full stop, which suits a poem about something that "continues."
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does what it describes. It cuts back. No word is spare, and it offers no advice about slowing down and no neat consolation. It leaves the reader with a question and a sharp image, and the lack of a solution is part of the point, because the speaker promises to carry on exactly as before. For students, it shows how one invented compound word can carry an entire argument, and how punctuation, line length and sound can quietly support what the words say. Its irony is that anyone who reads it quickly, hunting for the point, may be using the self-razor on the poem itself.