Seven short lines, no punctuation, and a whole moral reversal packed inside them: Dave Bonta's "In suspension" begins with a person sitting patiently and ends with a funeral. The speaker starts by accepting a situation: "I am here to wait." The poem never says where "here" is, and it doesn't need to. A waiting room, a corridor and a queue all fit, which makes the position feel like something everyone has occupied. What matters is the speaker's guess that the experience "may teach me how / I make others wait." Waiting becomes a lesson in empathy, a way of feeling from the inside what the speaker usually inflicts from the outside.
The structure follows that turn. The opening line stands alone, a single plain statement, and then the poem moves in three couplets, as if it were slowly gathering weight. The break after "how" is the most telling. The reader has to hang for a moment before "I make others wait" arrives, so the line break makes us wait, too. The same effect comes from the missing punctuation. Without full stops, the sentences drift into one another and nothing is ever formally finished, which suits a poem whose title, "In suspension", means a state of being held up, undecided, unresolved. The title can also suggest particles hanging in a liquid, or a musical note held over before it resolves. It never settles on one meaning, and the poem doesn't either.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from repetition and from sound. "Wait" closes both the first line and the fourth, so the opening idea is bracketed by its own echo, and the speaker is caught between being the one who waits and being the cause of it. The second half of the poem changes texture. "Present in absence" is a paradox, soft and sibilant, and it names what happens when someone keeps another person waiting: they are not there, yet they occupy the other person's thoughts. Then the sound hardens into "a body brought to be buried," where the repeated *b* thuds like a footfall or a spade. The grammar of that line also echoes the first one. "Here to wait" and "brought to be buried" are both passive, purposeful phrases, and the echo quietly suggests that waiting is a small rehearsal for being carried away.
The final image is the most unsettling. The comparison seems to say that the person who keeps others waiting is like a corpse, physically the centre of the occasion but unable to act, while "several" people carry the load. That detail carries the poem's accusation. Making someone wait is not only an inconvenience but a way of putting a burden on them, as the mourners carry a body that cannot help itself. The speaker, by this logic, is the passive weight, and everyone else does the work. It is a harsh and honest self-portrait, all the more striking because the speaker says "may teach me" and doesn't claim to have learned the lesson yet.
The last two lines, "several carrying it / in some little bed," are deliberately vague. "It" could be the body or the absence itself. "Some" is an indefinite word that makes the bed anonymous, as if the poem refuses to say whose death this is. "Bed" is a gentle word for a bier or coffin, and it brings in the old comparison between death and sleep. "Little" could suggest a child's size, or simply tenderness and diminishment. Judging by these choices, the poem prefers to leave the scene faintly blurred, so that the funeral works as a feeling rather than a story.
The poem is significant because of how much it does with so little. It takes one of the dullest human experiences and shows it to be a moral mirror. Most of us complain about being kept waiting and forget the times we have done it to others. Bonta's poem doesn't scold, and it doesn't resolve. It ends on a picture, not a conclusion, and leaves the reader suspended a little longer, which seems to be the point.