A boat doesn't dive. It rests on the surface and lets whatever lives beneath brush against its hull, and that one fact carries nearly all of Dave Bonta's "R.E.M." The speaker announces, "I sleep like a boat," and the simile turns a sleeping body into something buoyant and unanchored, rocked by forces it neither steers nor notices. Sleep here is not a plunge into nothingness but a kind of floating. The sleeper stays on top while something alive moves below, "touching the fish."
The title complicates this picture. R.E.M. stands for rapid eye movement, the stage of sleep in which the eyes flicker beneath closed lids and dreams tend to be most vivid. A reader who knows this expects activity: images, stories, a busy mind. The poem answers with "without any thought going / through the dark water." The gap between title and text is where the poem lives. The phase of the night we call busiest is described as quiet, even blank. One could guess that the fish stand for the darting of the eyes, small movements under a still surface, though the poem never says so. That is an inference the title invites, not something the text states.
The construction is spare. The poem is a single sentence stretched over four lines, with no rhyme and no punctuation, not even a full stop. The lines grow and shrink: two short ones, then a longer third, then a medium closing line. The third line is the one that stretches, and its ending on "going" matters. Because of the line break, we briefly read "without any thought going" as if a thought were in motion, and only then does "through the dark water" arrive to say where it was not going. Absence is given a direction of travel before it is denied.
The grammar is also pleasantly slippery. "Without any thought" could belong to the sleeper ("I sleep… without any thought") or to the boat touching the fish. A boat has no intentions, so it touches the fish without meaning to. Perhaps the sleeper meets whatever lies under consciousness in the same unplanned way. Both readings agree on contact without intention, and the lack of punctuation lets them sit side by side without forcing a choice.
Sound does quiet work too. "Sleep" and "fish" are soft, hushing words, and the long vowels of "boat," "going," and "through" make the lines feel like drifting. "Thought" and "through" begin with the same breathy "th," so the word for thinking and the word for passage almost slide into each other, as though thought could be a fish moving across the line. Then the poem ends on two heavy beats, "dark water." "Dark" slows the line, and "water" lets it trail away. With no closing punctuation, the water seems to carry on past the edge of the page.
The imagery is minimal, just a boat, fish, and water, but the three are stacked like layers of a mind: surface, creature, depth. Notice how gently the verb is chosen. The fish are "touched," not hooked or hunted. No one is fishing here, and no one is at the oars. The speaker is the passive vessel, and "dark" suggests the unknown rather than anything threatening. Fish are a familiar image for thoughts rising out of the deep, and the poem seems to know it, bringing the creatures close and then refusing the thought itself.
The poem is worth reading for how much it does with so little. It takes a clinical label and turns it into a physical feeling: the weightless, unsteered quality of being asleep. It also shows that what a poem leaves out can be its subject. Here the missing thought, the missing punctuation, and the missing ending all say the same thing, that sleep is a condition in which the mind lets go of its grip and simply floats.