Lying in the dark with nothing to do but think is an old way of trying on other lives, and Dave Bonta's "Mutable" begins exactly there: "lying alone and thinking / I could be anyone." The title names the poem's central idea. To be mutable is to be changeable, and the speaker, with no company to hold a self in place, feels identity loosen into something open-ended. The poem then tests that openness with a handful of images, and the last of them is unexpectedly ordinary.
Look at the very first word. "Lying" means lying down, but it also means telling untruths, and the second sense hovers over the claim that follows. Is "I could be anyone" a liberating thought or a comfortable fiction? The poem never says. That ambiguity suits a poem about slipperiness. The line break helps too: "thinking" hangs at the end of the line, and the thought itself arrives only on the next, as if the mind had to tip over an edge to reach it.
The next couplet gives the "anyone" a face: "face like a cake / or a clock." The two nouns are an odd pair, yet they share more than their round shape. Both even sound alike, with the hard *k* of "cake" snapping back in "clock." A cake suggests sweetness, celebration, something made to be eaten and gone. A clock suggests time passing and counting down. A birthday cake, of course, joins the two, since it marks the years. The word "or" opening the second line matters as well. The speaker doesn't settle on one comparison but lets the face slide from one thing to the other, which enacts the mutability the title promises. A face is usually what makes us recognisable, and here it becomes a surface that can be anything.
The third couplet turns from the face to the body: "great heart ready to give / body in peace." The heart reads as generous, big and willing, and "ready to give" has a lovely openness. But "body in peace" sounds like "rest in peace," and the speaker is, after all, lying still. Judging by these echoes, the poem may be brushing against the thought of death, or at least of the body as something that will one day be given up. "Give" could mean love, charity, or surrender. Bonta leaves all of these available, and the missing punctuation lets the phrases blur into one another. Nothing is fenced off by a comma or full stop, so the reader drifts through the poem much as the speaker's mind drifts.
Then comes the final line, set apart on its own: "having money." After cake, clock, a great heart and a peaceful body, the poem lands on something plain and practical. It is easy to hear this as a joke, a deflation, the way a daydream about being anyone ends up wanting a bank balance. But it connects back to what came before. Money is perhaps the most mutable thing there is, because it can be turned into almost anything else. It is also what a "heart ready to give" needs in order to give. Grammatically, "having" completes a pattern begun by "lying" and "thinking": three -ing words, three states of being rather than actions, with the speaker never actually doing anything. Wanting to be anyone, the speaker ends up wishing for the one thing that would make that possible.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines are short and quiet, and they thin out as they go, from the longer opening couplet to a last line of only two words. Lowercase, unpunctuated, it reads like a half-spoken thought in bed. That plainness is its strength. In so few words it holds wonder, mortality, generosity and a rueful honesty about material need, and it lets the reader decide whether "I could be anyone" is a promise or a lie.