Six lines, three couplets, no rhyme and not a single mark of punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Death of the amateur" looks almost too slight to carry an argument. Yet it moves from open-air idleness to exhaustion to burial, and the grave turns out to be a job.
The title sets the terms. "Amateur" comes from the Latin word for lover, and that is the sense the poem cares about: someone who does a thing out of love, not for a wage. The speaker's amateur pursuit is thinking itself. He walks "the streets with nothing / to do but think outside." The phrase echoes the office cliché "think outside the box," except that the box has gone missing. What remains is the bare word "outside," which works literally (he thinks out of doors, on his feet) and as a small declaration of freedom. The line break helps. "With nothing" hangs for a moment, as if he were empty-handed, before "to do" turns that emptiness into leisure.
Then the weather arrives. "I weather myself" is the strangest phrase in the poem and the richest. To weather something is to expose it to the elements until it is worn or seasoned, like wood or stone. It also means to endure, as in weathering a storm. The reflexive "myself" makes the wearing-down self-inflicted, or at least self-chosen. Aimless walking has a cost, and the next line, the longest in the poem, shows it: "so sleepy I cannot hold open my eyes." The long "o" sounds in "so," "hold" and "open" stretch the line out until it droops. The dropped "that" after "so" gives it a slurred, half-asleep casualness. There is an irony here too. A walker-thinker depends on his eyes, and they are the first thing to fail.
The last couplet shifts the grammar. The sentence runs across the stanza break on a bare "and," so sleep slides into burial with no full stop to mark a death. The voice of the verbs changes as well. After "I walk" and "I weather," the speaker is acted upon: he "must be buried." The "must" implies compulsion, but nobody is named as the one doing the burying. It could be economic necessity, social expectation, or the speaker's own tiredness. The poem leaves the question open, and that vagueness is part of its chill.
"In some profession" delivers the final blow, largely through the word "some." It is not medicine or law, only "some" profession, because any one will do. What matters is that there is one. "Profession" is also the longest word in a poem built almost entirely of plain one- and two-syllable words, so it lands like a slab on top of everything before it. It shares a root with "profess," to declare publicly or take vows. To become a professional is to commit to one declared identity, and the poem sets that against the amateur's open-ended wandering.
A second reading is possible. If the speaker has been weathering himself, a profession could be shelter as well as grave, a roof against the elements. The poem never chooses between the two. Its quiet suggestion may be that security and burial are the same thing seen from different sides.
The poem is significant for how much it does without raising its voice. It does not scold employers or romanticise unemployment. Its tone is deadpan, almost resigned, and it trusts a few carefully chosen words ("outside," "weather," "buried," "some") to do the arguing. Anyone who has been asked what they are going to do with their life will recognise the pressure behind it. The poem also asks what is lost when love of a thing, here the free act of thinking, has to become a career. In six lines it suggests that what dies is not the thinker but the thinking, and that it dies quietly, in a half-sleep, with no one clearly to blame.