Six lines, no capital letters, one colon: Dave Bonta's "Business as usual" is built like a sentence that loses its grip as it goes. The title is an idiom for carrying on as if nothing were wrong. The poem's first move is to take that comfort away. What is "usual" here is not routine in the cheerful sense but "sickness," and the word "our" makes it collective from the start. The poem doesn't say which illness, or whether the sickness is bodily, social or something broader. That openness is deliberate, and it lets the poem speak to more than one kind of suffering.
The colon after "sickness" works like an equals sign. "our usual business / is sickness" reads as a definition, flat and almost bureaucratic. The two key words also share an ending, so "business" and "sickness" chime as a near-rhyme, and the sound welds trade to illness. "Business" is a slippery word, meaning an occupation, a concern, or commerce. The poem lets all three meanings hover, and none of them is flattering.
After the colon, the poem stops making statements and starts piling up fragments. "all the hurt / to all our families" has no verb, and its grammar is open. The hurt might be suffered by families, or it might be done to them. The repeated "all" sweeps everything into one gesture, and the plain, mostly one-syllable words keep it from sounding melodramatic. The rhythm is clipped throughout. Each line holds only three to five syllables, so the poem moves in short, tired breaths. There is no regular metre and no end-rhyme, but "hurt" and "work" share a vowel sound, and that quiet echo links pain with labour two lines later.
"a great feast of work" is the poem's one burst of richness. A feast implies abundance and celebration, and attaching it to work is jarring. One reading is that sickness creates endless tasks, such as caring, treating and organising, so there is more than enough to go round. Another is that someone is feeding on the suffering. The poem doesn't choose between these, and the irony depends on that. Notice also that "great" is the only big, generous-sounding word in a poem of small ones, which makes the line feel almost like a bitter toast.
The last line, "cards to the blind," is the strangest and the most open. The simplest reading is get-well cards sent to people who cannot see them: kind gestures that miss their target. The poem may be suggesting that the ways we respond to illness are often well meant but beside the point. "The blind" could also mean people who refuse to see what is happening around them. A card player might hear something else, because in poker the "blind" is a bet placed before the cards are seen, so the phrase could suggest dealing and gambling in the dark. That is an inference, not something the poem confirms, but it fits the title's commercial tone. In every reading the last image is one of failed communication, something offered that cannot be received.
The ending also matters for what it leaves out. There is no full stop, no resolution and no consoling turn. The poem stops on "blind," a single stressed syllable, and the missing punctuation suggests the business simply continues, as usual. The lowercase lines reinforce this, since nothing is raised up or marked as special. Sickness here is not a dramatic event but the ordinary ground of life.
This compression is what makes the poem worth reading. In under thirty words it takes a stock phrase, reverses its meaning, and leaves the reader to connect the pieces: the shared condition, the damage to families, the grim abundance of work, the useless cards. It never explains itself or tells us how to feel, and the deadpan voice is more unsettling than outrage would be. A poem this short could be forgotten in a minute, but this one makes the reader return to the title and hear "usual" differently.