Carnival is supposed to be loud: masks, feasting, the world turned upside down. Dave Bonta's "Carnivalesque" is almost whispered. It has twelve lines, six couplets, no punctuation and no capital letters except the lone "I". Yet the title is not a joke, because the poem keeps yoking together things that normally stay apart: filth and love, a horse and a body, a choir and a grave, a window and a gap in a wall. The carnival here seems to happen inside the speaker's head. Judging by the imagery, the poem asks how a person can live with a mortal, messy body and a world of loss, and its answer is modest. You make something out of what you have, and you decide, almost as a duty, to be content.
The opening sets this up with a sentence that spills across the stanza break: "if I make filth and love / from that horse the body". The verb "make" treats living as a craft. The body is a "horse", an animal that carries us but can also bolt, something we ride rather than fully command. Both "filth" and "love" come out of the same creature, and the poem doesn't rank them. Then comes the consequence: "I think myself obliged / to think myself happy". The doubled "think myself" turns happiness into something reached by effort, and "obliged" makes it a duty rather than a feeling. The line is quietly comic and quietly sad. The speaker does not say "I am happy", only that he must think himself so.
The next images drift outward. The "winds that come / only to entertain us" are like travelling performers at a fair, and the word "only" cuts two ways. It can sound grateful, as in "how kind of the winds", or deflating, as in "that is all they're good for". The wind then seems to turn into sound itself: "a choir of voices buried / in one infinite chapel". The phrase contradicts itself on purpose. "Buried" suggests a grave and "infinite" suggests open sky, so the chapel is both a tomb and a space with no walls. Because this follows the winds, a reader might hear gusts moaning through a building like singing, though the poem never says so. The soft *w* sounds of "winds", "window", "awake", "was" and "way" thread through the poem and give it a faint breathy murmur.
The fifth couplet is the most concrete and the hinge of the poem: "a window is better than an absence / which disgraces the stone". "Disgraces" is a surprisingly moral word to apply to masonry, as if a hole in a wall were something shameful. A window is also an absence, but one that has been given edges and a purpose. That echoes the opening, where filth and love were made from the body. Raw lack becomes a frame through which to look. The poem's own two-line stanzas work a little like small windows, each one cut into silence.
The ending shifts tense and mood: "awake I was angry / to sleep is to give way". With no punctuation, the lines can be read as two separate statements or as one rush of thought. "Give way" is rich in meaning. It can mean to yield, to collapse, or to make room for something else, and sleep sits uneasily close to death. The speaker has set anger against surrender and offers no resolution. Read this way, the earlier "obliged to think myself happy" looks like a middle path between the two, a chosen stance rather than a natural state.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its short lines follow the pace of speech, and nearly every couplet breaks mid-thought ("obliged / to think", "come / only", "buried / in", "absence / which"), so the reader is always tipped forward into the next line. The vocabulary is plain and mostly short, with a few larger words ("infinite", "disgraces", "entertain") that stand out like carved details. Order comes instead from echoes: "think myself" twice, "awake" against "sleep", "window" against "absence".
That economy is what makes the poem worth reading. In twelve unadorned lines it holds the body, joy, grief, sound, architecture and sleep without telling the reader how to feel. The mood is neither despair nor celebration but something tougher, a decision to keep building windows.