The Sandman of bedtime stories is a confident figure. He slips in at dusk, scatters sand over drowsy eyes and goes about his job without a doubt. The speaker of Dave Bonta's poem is nothing like that. He begins with a question, "where am I with my bag of sand", and never gives it a question mark, as if the uncertainty were too tired for punctuation. The poem is five lowercase lines with no punctuation at all. Nothing is fenced off and nothing is finished, so the poem drifts the way a mind does just before sleep.
At its centre is the weariness of being the one who delivers rest. The bag of sand is his tool, but he holds it "like a bad condition", a simile that refuses to be tidy. A condition can be an illness, a state or a stipulation, and "bad" tips it towards ailment. The sandman seems less like a magical visitor than someone carrying a burden he can't put down. He may even suffer from the sleep he hands out. The poem never settles the question, and that openness gives it its pull.
Sound is where the poem is most inventive. Line three, "with this little nest to press rest", runs one sound through three words: nest, press, rest. It ends on two stressed syllables side by side, so the line slows and sinks as it finishes. "Press" is a well-chosen verb. To press rest onto someone suggests grains pushed into the eyes, a head pushed into a pillow, a lid pushed shut. Rest becomes something applied, even a little forceful, while the "little nest" promises softness. Smaller echoes work quietly elsewhere. "Bag" and "bad" share an opening and a vowel, which links the sandman's equipment to his unease. The word "sand" also contains "and", which returns three times in the last line, as though the sand were spilling into the ending.
The fourth line is the longest and the most ambiguous. Splitting "every body" into two words makes us hear "body", the physical shape of someone lying down, instead of the abstract "everybody". Then comes "a nothing", which sits close to "nobody" and makes sleep sound like a blank, a zero. The grammar slides. Either each body is a nothing the speaker carries home, or he is gathering up the nothingness in everyone. With no commas to choose for us, both readings stay. The line is also loaded with small unstressed words ("that I am taking"), so it drags as though it were heavy.
Then the weight is released into "home and home and home". The repeated "and" works like footsteps, or a rocking cradle, or the refrain of a lullaby. "Home" appears three times without being reached, and the repetition makes it sound more like a chant than a destination. It answers the opening "where am I" with a word that is more wish than place. Judging by the imagery, "home" might mean the bed, the body, or something larger and more final. The poem hints at the old closeness between sleep and death through "nothing", but it never says so outright.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does in so little space. It takes a familiar nursery figure and turns him inside out, so that we look from inside his head instead of from the child's pillow. It also lets form carry meaning. The missing punctuation, the sinking rhyme of "press rest" and the lulling last line make the poem behave like the sleep it describes, and a reader can feel the slide while reading it. The mood stays unsettled, comforting and uneasy at once. That is perhaps true to sleep itself, which we need and give ourselves up to, even though it looks so much like nothing.