"Scenesters" is a slightly teasing word for people who haunt the fashionable corners of a city and care about being seen in the right place in the right clothes. Dave Bonta gives his poem that title and then spends nine short lines quietly taking the mockery back. The central idea is that the habits of these urban wanderers (the dark clothes, the aimless walking, the scrap of food) add up to a faith, and a sincere one. The poem builds a church out of things that rarely get called holy.
It starts with clothing. "A black coat long in mourning" can be read two ways. The coat may be a long one, or it may have been in mourning for a long time. Black is the scene's uniform, and it is also the colour of grief, so the same garment is a fashion statement and a sign of loss. The poem never says what is being mourned, and that silence helps it. The loss could be personal or the loss of a way of life, and the text leaves that open. Then comes the surprise: the coat "is our second home." A home is usually something you live in, but here it is something you wear, and shelter has shrunk to the size of a body. The long "o" sounds in "coat," "long," "mourning" and "home" give the stanza a low, tolling hum.
In the second stanza the walkers step into "the shoemaker's / weary chapel." The line break matters. "The shoemaker's" hangs unfinished for a moment, and the reader expects a shop. "Chapel" arrives instead and changes the building. A shoemaker mends worn things, so the humble craft becomes a kind of ministry of repair. "Weary" is an adjective that belongs to people and worn-out shoes, and here it is lent to the building, as if the whole place has been walked into exhaustion. Judging by the sound, there may also be a quiet pun on "sole" and "soul," though the poem never points to it. The verb "walk" does double duty too, since "we walk in" can mean entering the chapel or moving about inside it.
The last stanza holds the poem's biggest word and its smallest. "Liturgy" is formal and ancient, the vocabulary of ordered worship, and it is set beside "a bit of bread." The understatement is deliberate. Bread recalls communion, but "a bit" also suggests a cheap snack eaten on the move, and the poem lets both meanings stand without choosing. Then the scale changes. The final phrase, "the infinite street," is the largest image in the poem, and it ends on a blunt, stressed word. The chapel has no walls after all.
Read in order, the poem expands in three steps: coat, chapel, street. It moves from a body to a building to a whole city, and each step outward is also a step toward the sacred. The shift is helped by the pronouns, because "our" or "we" appears in every stanza. The poem never says "I." The faith it describes is shared, a congregation of people who recognise each other by their coats and their walking.
The form does the same quiet work. There are three tercets, no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Lines run from about four syllables to about nine, and the longest, "our liturgy is a bit of bread," sits just before the final line, where the rhythm shortens and settles. Without full stops, the lines run on like a murmur or a litany said under the breath, which suits a poem about private ritual. The grammar is simple, and almost every sentence is built on "is" or "walk." That plainness keeps the big words from sounding inflated.
The poem is significant because it takes a label that often carries a sneer and finds devotion under it. It suggests that holiness comes from attention and repetition, from the same coat, the same route and the same bread, more than from architecture or doctrine. In nine lines it makes a reader look again at the stylish stranger on the pavement and ask whether the walk is a kind of prayer.