A poet laureate is supposed to be a grand public figure, and Dave Bonta's title promises one. What we get instead is a diary entry about a dead car, a cold apartment and a tired woman. The gap between the lofty title and the grubby details is where the poem's humour and its meaning both sit. The speaker may someday be celebrated, but the poem catches her at the point where being a person is too much work to leave room for being a poet.
The first stanza is a chain of small disasters told in one breathless rush. She takes a "mental health day," and her poems are "dwindling like unused / extra fingers." The simile is odd and funny. Extra fingers are surplus, something the body doesn't need, yet they are still part of her, and they shrink when ignored. That is how she sees her poetry. Then the omens arrive: the car won't start, the heat fails, and "in between" the therapist says she must "learn to let go." The poem makes the advice sound almost cruel. How can anyone let go when everything around her is breaking? Her question, "How can I relax / when my mechanic charges twice / as much as my therapist?", turns that frustration into a joke about money. The car, it seems, is a more expensive patient than her mind.
The writing here is deliberately unpoetic. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, just the loose rhythm of someone complaining to a friend. Sentences spill over line breaks ("the car / that wouldn't start," "I ask / the radiator repairman"), so they sound like speech running ahead of itself. The knocking radiator is a small gem: she wants it fixed "so it doesn't knock," and the noise reads easily as a stand-in for her own nerves. The stanza then ends on its plainest line, "I need things to be simpler than they are." After all the comic detail, this is the first moment with no joke in it, and it works as the stanza's confession.
The second stanza shifts into the future tense. "Today" the car is still dead and she works eleven hours, but then the poem turns to a plan: "I'll rent an old movie / & fall asleep on the couch." The ampersands make the journal feel hurried, written fast and late. The couch is the poem's quiet joke and its answer. Therapists famously keep couches, and this one is cheaper. Where the therapist told her to let go, the cushions simply do it for her: they "will take me / as I am, will let me down gently." Her own sofa offers the acceptance she can't get from advice.
The imagery that follows is the best in the poem. The couch is a "kingdom of spare parts," which echoes both the mechanic's world and those unused fingers, but now spare things belong somewhere instead of being waste. She will "weight my pockets with ballast of coins / & combs." Ballast is what steadies a ship, so clutter becomes something that keeps her upright. Then comes a list of things she will leave alone: "let the missing socks stay missing, / pay no mind to the pens all sticky with ink." Letting go, the poem shows, doesn't mean fixing things. It means ceasing to demand that they be fixed. That is a different request from the earlier "I need things to be simpler," because the mess stays and she simply stops fighting it.
One small puzzle is that she calls in sick in the first stanza yet works eleven hours in the second. The poem doesn't explain, but "Today" suggests the sick day was earlier and the exhaustion has caught up with her. A quiet irony also runs under the whole piece: she says her poems are dwindling, yet the journal entry we are reading is itself a poem.
What makes it matter is how kindly it treats ordinary tiredness. Nothing heroic happens. Her small, stubborn plan to sink into a couch is presented as a real act of survival, and the poem finds dignity in that.