Home is usually something a road leads to, but in Dave Bonta's "King of the road" the road gives up first. "The road home / went off and ended" is the whole first stanza, and it is stranger than it looks. The road is the one that acts, as if it had a will of its own. "Went off" can mean wandered away, but it also has the sour sense of food gone off, or an alarm going off. The poem doesn't say which. Then comes "ended," flat and final, with no punctuation to soften it. What follows is not a lament. The speaker becomes something else, a bird in a worn suit, and the poem's central idea is that when the way back disappears, a different kind of belonging becomes possible. It is the belonging of the traveller who needs no destination.
The title does much of the work here. "King of the road" is a familiar phrase, and it recalls the well-known song of that name about a proudly shabby drifter. Whether the poet meant that echo is a guess on my part, but the poem certainly plays with the idea of a ragged sovereignty. Then the second stanza turns the title into a pun: the "king" of the road becomes a kingfisher. The bird is a good choice because it is a creature of perches and sudden dives. It doesn't live in one place so much as pass through places, striking and moving on.
The most surprising image is the "old felt suit." A kingfisher is usually thought of as dazzling, so we expect jewel colours. Instead the plumage is felt, a humble, matted, slightly dusty fabric, and the suit is old. The bird looks like a tramp in secondhand clothes who has somehow kept his dignity. That tension between royalty and poverty holds the poem together. The speaker doesn't say "I am like a kingfisher." He says the bird is "my other self," which suggests a companion identity that was there all along and only now comes forward. Judging by the imagery, losing the road home is also a kind of release, since the lost person gets to be someone freer.
The poem is built very economically. It has no rhyme and no punctuation, and only the "I" is capitalised. The lines are short, and their lengths shift: five syllables, then three and five, then nine, five and four, if we count by ear. The long line, "a kingfisher is my other self," stands out in the middle of all that brevity, as though the speaker's real revelation takes more breath than the rest. Even without rhyme, the sounds link up. "Self" and "felt" share their f and their short e. "Eat" and "suit" end on the same crisp t. Most tellingly, the long o sound of "road," "home" and "go" appears in the first stanza and again in the very last word. The poem begins by losing a road and ends by choosing to go, and that sound makes a quiet circle between the two.
That final line, "I eat and go," is the poem's most important moment. It is as stripped as a line can be, with two verbs joined by "and" and no object, no reason and no destination. It describes the kingfisher's way of life, a quick dive, a meal and a departure, and it also describes a human attitude. The present tense turns it into a habit, a way of living that has replaced the old plan of getting home. The poem doesn't tell us whether this is a consolation or a loss. It could be a grief carried lightly, or a freedom that was hiding inside the grief. That ambiguity is what keeps the poem alive after the last line.
Its significance lies in how much it carries in so few words. In under twenty words it holds a vanished route, a pun, a transformation and a whole philosophy of living, and it doesn't explain any of them. A reader is left to decide what kind of ending the road has met, and whether to feel sorry for the speaker or envy him.