"Dream job" is a phrase usually kept for the career you would give anything to land. Dave Bonta hangs it over six short lines about going to bed, and the joke is double. The job happens inside a dream, and it is the one job nobody gets to quit. The speaker announces "time to sleep" and in the same breath calls sleep "the work I spend hours in." Rest, normally the opposite of labour, has become a shift.
The syntax makes this stranger than it first looks. Because the first line ends after "sleep," the words can be read two ways. Sleep may be the work, or "to sleep" may take an object, as in sleeping off the day's labour: *time to sleep the work I spend hours in*. The line break lets both readings stand. Daytime work and nighttime work blur, and the preposition at the end of the line, "in," makes the work feel like a room the speaker has been shut inside for hours. Without any punctuation to settle the question, the poem keeps both meanings in play.
What the work consists of arrives in the second couplet: "my father and others / go through my mind." The idiom is ordinary, but it does a lot. Faces and memories pass through like a procession, and "go through" can also suggest sorting through someone's things, drawer by drawer. The poem never says the father is dead. That is an inference, though the word "legacy" in the next stanza makes it hard to avoid. It is also telling that only the father is specific. "Others" is a blur of unnamed people, which is how such figures tend to surface at night, one clear face among a crowd.
The last couplet delivers the surprise. "Legacy" prepares us for a house, a watch, a name, something you could put in a box. What the speaker receives is "of evening." The inheritance is a time of day. Evening is where daylight ends, so the word can suggest the late part of a life, the hour the father has already reached and the son is approaching. It is also literal: the speaker is sitting in the evening at this very moment, about to sleep, so he inherits the hour he is standing in. The verb matters too. He "receive[s]," which is passive. His only task is to let the others pass through and accept what they leave. The dream job turns out to be this: not doing, but being a recipient.
The form supports that quiet, receptive mood. There are three couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation, so the poem has no full stop to close it. It simply trails off the way thought does just before sleep. The diction is plain and mostly short: "time," "sleep," "work," "mind." The longest and most abstract words, "legacy" and "evening," arrive together in the final couplet, and the enjambment between "legacy" and "of evening" delays the poem's last word until the line has almost run out. "Evening" then sits alone at the end, and it faintly echoes the long *e* of "sleep" in the opening line. The poem ends on a sound close to the one it began with, as if the day had folded shut.
The small linking words also push the poem along. The third stanza begins with "and," a drifting, additive connector, so that thoughts of the father seem to lead on to the inheritance without any argument. Nothing is explained or concluded. The speaker lets one image slide into the next, which is what the poem is about.
The poem is slight, but it holds more than its length suggests. It suggests that rest is not empty time, because the people we have lost may do their most persistent work then. It also suggests that what a parent passes on need not be property or advice. It can be a way of occupying the end of a day, and eventually the end of a life. By calling all this a "dream job," the poem keeps a thread of dry humour running through something tender. The speaker can smile at the phrase while recognising that the work of remembering is unpaid, unavoidable and a little sacred.