Eight lines, four couplets, no punctuation, no capital letters apart from the lone "I": Dave Bonta's "Improvisational" looks like something jotted down in passing. That looseness is deliberate. The title is an adjective with nothing to describe, and the poem fills the gap itself. It is the improvisation, words made up on the spot in a place where little else is happening.
The setting takes two strokes: "the dead town / and all the infected places." The poem never says what the infection is, and that silence matters. It could be literal illness, a cultural or spiritual sickness, or simply the feeling of places that have stopped working as places. The text leaves the choice to the reader. The slide from "town" to "places" also widens the view. The first is a specific spot, the second sprawls, as though the deadness is bigger than any one map reference.
Against this stands the speaker's single action: "I make words out of / other times and doors." The line break after "out of" leaves the sentence hanging, so the reader has to drop to the next line to find the raw material, much as a speaker might reach for the next thing to say. The materials are an odd pair. Times suggest memory, and doors suggest ways in or out. Judging by the imagery, the words are built from salvage, from whatever the past and the possibility of leaving can offer.
The word "other" then repeats three times: "other times and doors," "other discourse and hubbub," "other wonder." Each repetition pushes further from the present. "Discourse" is formal, the language of conversation and argument, while "hubbub" is a clatter of a word that sounds like what it names, with its blunt b's. Together they suggest crowded, talkative, living places, the opposite of the dead town. Then "wonder" arrives alone at the end of the stanza with no companion noun, the quietest item in the list and perhaps the biggest.
The turn comes in the last couplet, where "other" gives way to "the same." Everything the speaker conjures is plural and varied, but the quiet is singular and unchanging. The adjective "reproaching" is the strangest choice in the poem, because a quiet does not usually reproach anyone. Who is being blamed, and for what? Perhaps the speaker for making noise, or for being unable to mend anything. Perhaps the quiet is itself a rebuke to the state of the town. The poem refuses to say. The small word "and" also matters: the quiet is not the enemy of the words but one more item added to the list, something that keeps company with the speaker's talk and never goes away.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The short lines carry two or three stresses each and read like plain speech. The opening has a dull, tolling feel in "dead town," with its heavy d and t sounds. The final line, "reproaching quiet," slows down and trails off through its long vowels and soft endings. With no full stop to close it, the poem does not conclude so much as stop, and the quiet gets the last word, in the form of the page's own white space.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It makes no grand claim that poetry cures or conquers. It offers something more modest and more believable: making words, borrowed from other times and other voices, is a way of keeping company with emptiness, and the emptiness may well stay. For students, it shows how much can be done with very little. A handful of plain words, a repeated "other," and one unexpected adjective are enough to hold a whole mood of isolation, resourcefulness, and unresolved blame.