Tucked inside the word "bewildered" is "wilder," and wilderness is not far behind. Dave Bonta's poem seems to know this, because it opens by turning the word inside out: "my head full of outback." The usual image of confusion is a crowded, buzzing mind. Here the head is full of space. "Outback" calls up a vast, remote, hard-to-read landscape where there are no landmarks and one horizon looks like the next. The poem's idea is that bewilderment is the loss of the ability to measure, whether distance, time or even oneself, and it spends its six short lines acting that loss out.
The second stanza makes the point most clearly. "I am with great difficulty finding / the difference between short and long." The phrase "with great difficulty" is stiff and formal, almost like a clerk filling in a form, and that tone is funny set against the unmarked openness of the first line. The speaker is also failing at something a child can do. "Short" and "long" are the most basic opposites we have, and the poem says they have blurred. There is a small joke in the sound, too, since "long" is itself a short word, one syllable the same weight as "short." The poem doesn't say what is being measured. Judging by the outback image, it could be distance, since in a huge landscape a mile and ten miles can feel alike. Or it could be time, which the next stanza suggests.
That stanza turns on the word "occasion." "I have occasion / to mix my occasions." The first use belongs to a polite, official idiom ("I have occasion to write to you"), so it means something like "I find it necessary." The second use means events, moments, the separate times when things happen. The line break after "occasion" leaves the word hanging for a beat, and then the poem repeats it with an added "s," so that the sentence shows itself mixing the word it names. Occasions, which are supposed to be distinct and ordered, pour into each other: this meeting and that one, then and now, the short and the long. The speaker has lost the sense of when things happened, and perhaps of which version of himself was there.
That is where the last line goes: "another me to cast." It has no verb to carry it and no full stop, so it reads less like a statement than a wish, or a want-ad. "Cast" is rich in possible meanings. A director casts an actor in a role, so the speaker may need a second self to play the part he can't manage. A fisherman casts a line out into open water, a gesture that fits the outback's wide emptiness. A metalworker casts a copy from a mould, and a snake casts its skin. The poem doesn't choose among these, and the refusal is part of its effect. A bewildered mind can't settle on a single meaning, and neither can the reader.
The construction is as spare as the landscape it imagines. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, only free verse with its stresses scattered. The shape is 1–2–2–1, so the two full sentences in the middle are bracketed by two lowercase fragments, one at each end. The only marks of formality are the capital "I" of the middle stanzas, which are also the stanzas of difficulty and confusion, as though the self is clearest, and most in trouble, when it is trying to speak in complete sentences. At the edges, where the sentences give way, there is only the outback and a half-formed wish. The title is the only place the feeling is named. Everything else is image and symptom, so the reader has to work out the mood from the evidence.
The poem stays in the mind because it makes confusion into something precise. It doesn't describe being lost so much as lose its footing in front of us, through a pompous phrase, a repeated word and a dangling infinitive. It is also wry. The speaker's tone is dry and almost courteous, even while his sense of scale and self is slipping away. A poem this short can't solve anything, but it can make the reader feel for a moment what it is like to stand in an open space and not know how far anything is.