A greeting is supposed to be the easiest sentence in the language, yet Dave Bonta's "Pleasantries" treats it as something faintly sickening. The poem has no plot and no named people, only a few clipped glimpses of daily social life: a morning hello, a woman who talks and talks, a mind that won't settle, a workplace conversation. Its central idea is that politeness and small talk, meant to smooth things over, can feel empty and even oppressive, and that the person noticing this may not come out of it looking kind.
The first stanza sets this up in its opening phrase, "the badness / of our good morning." Two opposite words sit almost on top of each other, and the ritual phrase "good morning" is turned into a thing with a quality. Calling the badness a property "of our" greeting makes it shared, as if both speakers are quietly complicit. Then comes "her long stories out of nothing." The phrase is double-edged. Making something "out of nothing" sounds like a talent, but here it describes talk that fills silence without saying anything. The line is also the longest in the stanza, and it stretches, as the stories do.
The second stanza is the hardest to pin down, and that is where the poem gets interesting. "An unkind mind / to put in order" can be read several ways. The speaker may be trying to tidy their own irritable thoughts, or the unkind mind may belong to someone else. Then "but not because of owning it" turns on the double meaning of "owning." It could mean possession, or it could mean admitting, as in owning up. If it means admitting, the speaker is saying the mind gets put in order without any confession of fault. I'd call this reading an interpretation, since the syntax allows others, but the uncertainty seems deliberate. Whatever the exact meaning, the stanza suggests the speaker has caught their own impatience and judged it. "Unkind" is a word of self-reproach as much as complaint.
The sounds support this tangle of thought. "Unkind mind" is almost a rhyme with itself, two words locked together like a thought going round in a loop. Otherwise the poem avoids rhyme, and there is no punctuation or capital letter anywhere. Without full stops, no sentence ever properly finishes, which suits a poem about talk that never quite ends. The same feeling comes from the grammar. Six words end in "-ing": "morning," "nothing," "owning," "talking," "being," "proving." Those present participles keep the action unfinished, as if the conversation were still going on while we read.
The final stanza widens the lens and then shuts it. "Talking in the room of being" is oddly grand. "Room" is physical and "being" is philosophical, so ordinary chat takes place inside existence itself, with no escape from it. Then the poem drops into the workplace: "and every part of work / proving a plague." Here the alliteration of "part," "work," "proving" and "plague" gives the line a clipped, spitting quality. "Plague" brings in contagion, so the pleasantries and the work feel like something caught from other people. "Proving" adds a courtroom or laboratory flavor, as if the evidence keeps piling up against the speaker's day.
The rhythm helps the reader feel this. Both of the first two stanzas build from a short line to a long one, roughly three syllables, then five, then eight, as if the talk is gathering momentum. The last stanza reverses the pattern and shrinks, ending on the blunt four syllables of "proving a plague." Instead of a conclusion we get a verdict, and it is bleak.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. Many poems about social awkwardness simply complain. This one is harder on the speaker than on anyone else, since the "unkind mind" and the strained "our" admit that the badness is partly theirs. The title, "Pleasantries," is ironic, but it also names the poem's real subject, the thin layer of courtesy over discomfort that nearly everyone knows. The poem doesn't resolve that discomfort. It only gives it a shape clear enough to recognize, and that is why a reader might finish the last line and think of their own Monday morning.