Twelve words, three lines and no full stop: Dave Bonta's "Haze" can be read in seconds, yet it leaves a faintly bitter aftertaste. A speaker is somewhere in the middle of an afternoon, drinking more than is good for them, and the blur of the day matches the blur of the mind. What the poem admits is less sorrow than hollowness. Even wishing, the thing people do when they want their lives to change, has run dry.
The first line looks outward. "In the haze of the afternoon" is the longest of the three, about eight syllables, and it drifts. Its small, unstressed words ("in the," "of the") barely weigh anything, so the stress lands only on "haze" and again on the last syllable of "afternoon." "Haze" works on two levels. It is weather, a heat-softened light that blurs edges, and it is also the mental fog of alcohol. The preposition matters too: the speaker is *in* the haze, not looking at it from a distance. Afternoon is an hour usually given over to errands and work, so drinking through it suggests either a small rebellion or a drift the speaker has stopped resisting. The poem doesn't say which.
The second line is the shortest, and its bluntness is the point. "Drinking too much" is squeezed between the two longer lines, as if the admission were being hidden. Notice what is missing: there is no "I am drinking" and no finite verb anywhere in the poem. "Drinking" is a participle, an action with no owner, a habit rather than an event. The phrase "too much" is also a judgment. Someone has decided what the right amount would be, and it may be the speaker, quietly disapproving of themselves.
Only in the last line does the self appear, and then only as a possessive: "my empty wishing." That single "my" is the poem's one personal word, and it arrives at the very end, as though the speaker could only claim ownership once the damage was named. "Empty" works in two directions. It suggests a drained glass, which fits the drinking, and it also means wishing with nothing inside it. The grammar is nicely unsettled here. "My empty wishing" could be a separate thing the speaker is doing, or a description of the drinking itself, as if swallowing a drink were a way of wishing and equally unfulfilled. Because the poem says "wishing" and not "wishes," we never learn what is wished for. Only the motion is left, with no object.
The sound reinforces this. There is no rhyme, but "drinking" and "wishing" share the same short *i* and the same *-ing* ending, and the *i* also runs through "in" and "empty." The repeated dull vowel makes the act and the longing sound like the same tired gesture. The syllables dwindle from eight to four to five, and the poem ends on an unstressed *-ing* with no punctuation to close it. Instead of finishing, it trails off. The lowercase opening and the lack of any punctuation make the text look as soft-edged as the afternoon it describes.
The poem is significant for its restraint. It gives no cause for the drinking, no scene, no confession of what went wrong, and it doesn't tell us who the speaker is or where they sit. It uses plain, everyday words, and the emptiness shows in how little there is on the page. A more dramatic poem might have described despair at length. This one lets the reader feel it through gaps, fragments and a missing full stop. For a student reader it is a good example of how line length, grammar and sound can carry as much meaning as images do, and of how a very short poem can leave a long silence behind it.