Cockaigne, in the old stories, is an imaginary land of ease and plenty, a paradise measured in full stomachs. Dave Bonta's poem borrows the name and strips the feast away. What the speaker asks for is "a place just wide enough for rocks" and "a land of fire / but no flag." The longed-for world is hard, bare and unowned, and the poem's central idea is that real abundance might mean the absence of false authority: no flags, no kings, no money. The speaker can imagine this place much more easily than he can live in it.
The poem opens in the imperative. "Find me" appears twice, addressed to no one in particular, and the demands pile up in a chain of descriptions: a place, a land, a world. Each is introduced in the same loose, repeating way ("a land...", "a world in which...", "where God will grow..."), so the poem feels like a wish being assembled piece by piece. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, only short lines in short stanzas. The lack of full stops lets the voice run on like someone talking half to himself, and it leaves the ending open.
The images of this ideal world turn the usual hierarchies upside down. In the "blockhead land" a beggar "must have / the greatest hands." The word "blockhead" is an insult, but it also echoes the "rocks" of the first stanza, so stupidity and stubborn solidity merge into a kind of virtue. "Must have" sounds like a law of this place, and the beggar's hands, the emblem of need, become the emblem of greatness. Money, by contrast, is "counterfeit nonsense / like a king's wind discernable to the eye." The line can be read in a few ways: breath, a bodily noise, or hot air in general. In each case something that should vanish is made visible, and its emptiness is exposed. The king's emptiness is loud, and the god of the next stanza is the reverse. God "will grow / in whatever body," a verb that makes divinity something like a plant, unenthroned and unchosen. The phrase "poor lord of silence" works twice, as pity and as poverty, and it joins the beggar in the previous stanza as a figure of dignity without power.
Then comes the hinge: "but I." The confident commands collapse into confession. The speaker is "overcome with seasickness," and the sea quietly reframes the whole poem as a voyage toward this land, with the traveller too queasy to arrive. He shuts his eyes "to the moon / and his green and horrible horses." The moon is pulled into the body of the poem here, since it governs the tides that unsettle his stomach, and the horses suggest waves, though the colour is a nightmare's. The phrase is full of heavy, breathy sounds, "green," "horrible," "horses," and it has a childlike horror, as if the speaker were naming the thing he is most afraid to look at. Closing his eyes also cancels the poem's earlier insistence on seeing, the wind "discernable to the eye." The man who wanted a transparent world now refuses to look at the one he's in.
The last stanza reverses the opening command. "Find me" becomes "hold me," and a request for a place becomes a request for a person. "Not knowing who" can be read as not knowing who is holding him, who he himself is, or whom he should ask. The final line, "as if I had been awake," leaves the strangeness unresolved. It may mean that only now, in someone's arms, does he feel awake, or it may hint that the whole vision was a dream. Either way, the poem ends in a state of need much like the beggar's.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles a very old fantasy. Instead of a land of idleness and gluttony, it imagines a utopia of poverty and silence, then admits honestly that wishing for it does not make the wisher strong enough to get there. The comfort it ends on is not a place but a pair of arms, which suggests that the poem's real hunger was never for a country at all.