Six lines, three couplets, and an entire day squeezed inside them. Dave Bonta's "Writing life" moves from morning to afternoon to the middle of the night, and the poet's relationship to language shifts at each stage. The central idea seems to be that real poetry belongs to the unguarded hours, and that anything we make solid or finished is already heading toward a crack. The poem delivers this with a shrug and a laugh rather than a sermon.
It opens with its boldest claim: "morning is the best poem." Notice that it doesn't say morning is the best time to *write* a poem. Morning *is* the poem, something complete before a word is put down. The next line takes it away again: "afternoon papers it over." The verb is clever because it works two ways. To "paper over" something is to hide a flaw behind a smooth surface, the way wallpaper hides a crack. But paper is also what writers use, and the afternoon is when drafts, notes and chores pile up. One verb holds both the cover-up and the writing. The poem suggests that the act of writing, or revising, or explaining, can bury what was first alive.
The second couplet picks up the cracks that wallpaper was hiding. "All settled things must break in pieces" sounds like a law of nature, and the word "must" gives it no wiggle room. "Settled" is a rich choice. It can mean a settled argument, a settled mind, a house that settles on its foundations, or sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. Whichever sense you hear, comfort and stability are what the poem says will fail.
Then comes "I believe in my sleep," and the lack of punctuation does real work. Read one way, "I believe" is a hedge tucked into the previous sentence ("must break in pieces, I believe"), and "in my sleep" drifts free. Read the other way, which the line break encourages, it is a creed that can only be spoken while unconscious. Awake, we like our lives papered and settled. Asleep, the poem implies, we know better.
The last couplet drops from the grand to the bodily. "Waked" is a slightly old-fashioned form, a little formal, and what it announces is "snoring." The poem never says whose. If the snoring is the speaker's own, the one who "believes" in sleep may just have been making a noise. If it belongs to someone else, it is an ordinary human sound crashing into a philosophical mood. Either way, the laugh in "I laugh to recollect it" deflates any pomposity. "Recollect" is worth a second look too, since it can also mean to collect again. After a couplet about things breaking in pieces, the speaker gathers the pieces up, and humor is the glue.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has no capitals, no punctuation and no rhyme, and its words are mostly short and plain, so it sounds like someone thinking aloud. The second couplet carries the longest lines, as if the thought swells just before it collapses into the snore. A quiet pattern of s-sounds runs through the poem: "papers," "settled," "pieces," "sleep," "snoring." It works like breathing and suits a poem that ends in the dark.
The title makes more sense after this reading. "Writing life" can mean the life of a writer, but it can also mean the act of composing a life, and the poem sketches one day as a draft. In the morning there is something raw and whole. By afternoon it has been smoothed and covered. At night everything is shaken loose again and then laughed at.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't exempt itself from its own argument. A poem that praises morning is necessarily written after the fact, on paper, which makes it a little like the afternoon it describes. Bonta seems to know this, and the self-mocking snore at the end keeps the poem honest. It gives a whole attitude to writing, trusting what comes unguarded and distrusting what looks finished, in six lines you can read in ten seconds and think about for much longer.