Five short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and by the end the reader feels harnessed. Dave Bonta's "Grind" is about work that has stopped being something we do and become something we are inside of. Its central idea is that modern office life, with its screens and deadlines, keeps the old shape of animal labour: the same slow circling, the same weight, and the same sadness that nobody is supposed to mention.
The title does a lot of the work, because the poem never uses a grinding verb. "Grind" brings several meanings with it at once: the "daily grind" of routine, and grinding as a physical act, like a millstone turning. Judging by the ox in line three, the second picture is clearly in play. An ox is a draft animal, and the poem lets us picture one walking its circle, which makes the repetitiveness of the office feel very old.
The opening line, "times touch and trouble us", is full of small surprises. "Times" is vague on purpose. It could mean hard times, the age we live in, or simply hours passing. The verbs are paired by sound, since *touch* and *trouble* both start with a hard *t* and share the same soft *u* vowel. "Touch" is gentle and "trouble" is not, so the line suggests an irritation that never lets go. Nothing here is violent. It is the steady pressure of a hand on a shoulder. Then comes the shortest line, "where we move", just three syllables, and it is oddly ambiguous. It can mean the places we physically go, or it can play on being *moved*, emotionally. Either way, the trouble follows us wherever we go.
Line three, "melancholy as an ox", is the poem's one simile, and it avoids the cliché. We say "strong as an ox" or "patient as an ox". Bonta gives the animal an inner life, and a sad one. Because the poem has no punctuation, "melancholy" can attach to the ox and also to "we" in the line above, so the people and the animal blur into one plodding figure. The long, slow word *melancholy* sounds like the thing it names, with its four syllables dragging against the short monosyllables around it.
The last two lines turn on the word "office", and they are the cleverest part of the poem. "The work done for the office" has a quiet pun in "done for", which means completed but also worn out, finished, ruined. Then "the office never off" repeats the word and shuts the loop. Notice that "office" contains "off" inside it, so the very word for the workplace holds the switch we are never allowed to use. The sound of the line pushes the same way: *office* and *off* echo each other, and *ox* in line three shares that short *o*, linking the animal to the workplace through sound as well as meaning. "Office" also has an older sense, a duty or a religious service said at set hours. That is an inference from the word, not something the poem says, but it fits: the job reads like a ritual that has to be performed over and over.
The form supports all of this. The lines are short, mostly six or seven syllables with one three-syllable pause, and they have no fixed meter or end rhyme. The rhythm shuffles rather than marches, like a tired animal's walk. The poem moves from the large and abstract ("times") to the collective ("us", "we"), then to one animal, and finally to a single building. The world shrinks to a workplace. And because the poem finishes without a full stop, it does not really end. The final line stops, but the grind goes on.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It has no complaint, no boss and no named misery. It just sets a modern word, "office", beside an ancient image, "ox", and lets the comparison sit there. The result is quiet and rather bleak, and it is also recognisable: anyone who has answered one last email after hours will see the ox's face in their own.