A diet plan should be about giving up cake. The speaker of Dave Bonta's poem gives up bread, salt, tenderness, truth and the whole of history, and still talks as though he were sensibly counting calories. That clash between a cheerful self-help voice and a bleak list of sacrifices drives the poem. It is a dark comedy about how a person might shrink his own humanity in order to survive a world at permanent war.
The opening line sets the joke going. The speaker has been "denied membership / in the exclusive club / of the deceased," so he is stuck being alive and must make the best of it. His first resolution plays on the word "wings," which can mean the chicken wings of an ordinary diet or the wings of angels, the afterlife he has just been refused. He will keep "only the wingbones," a skeleton of flight, and compares himself to "a songbird in August / half-naked from the molt." The image is oddly tender, a creature stripped down and exposed. Then the tone swerves. "Human beings / are the other white meat; / pork is a poor substitute" borrows a familiar advertising slogan and turns it cannibal. The line break after "Human beings" lets the phrase sit for a moment as a plain statement before the punchline arrives.
The central list of sacrifices is the poem's moral hinge. "Bread & salt" are, in many cultures, traditional tokens of welcome, so giving them up reads as giving up hospitality. Next to them comes "the speaking of truth / or its reasonable facsimiles," a phrase that sounds like a swipe at polite political language. Then the diet-talk flattens everything: "Too many calories. Bad / for the blood pressure." The breezy excuse makes the surrender sound more chilling, as if conscience were just another unhealthy indulgence.
The poem's darkest turn comes when the speaker renounces "all caresses, / except for the caress of the knife, / which is so good at making / a mouth that can't talk back." The word "caress" is twisted into violence, and the knife silences. After that, the speaker's wish to "live in the perpetual present / otherwise known as wartime" is no longer a quirky lifestyle choice. The poem never names a particular war, so the word works as a general condition: constant emergency, with no memory and no consequences. History, in this view, is a nuisance, and Bonta gives it an unexpectedly domestic image: its "urgent ticking" is "like / untrimmed toenails clicking / against the sidewalk." It is both a clock and a bit of personal neglect, nagging and a little embarrassing.
Formally, the poem is free verse, one unbroken block of thirty-three lines with no rhyme and no stanza breaks, so the speaker's logic never pauses for reflection. The rhythm is that of casual speech, and the sound-play is quiet but constant: "hams & hambones," "split / pea soup," "lean & mean." The ampersands are worth noticing too. They make the lists move quickly and lightly, so heavy things such as truth are tossed off in the same breath as salt. The poem also changes pace as it goes. The middle runs on short, flat declarations, but the final twelve lines are one long sentence that slows and spreads out, the way the ending's image does.
That image is the old barn cat "trotting / up the gravel driveway / in the rain, skinny enough / to fit between the drops / of God's own ordnance." It is vivid and almost admirable, a small animal moving unharmed through a storm. Yet rain becomes shellfire, and God becomes an armourer, so even the sky seems hostile. The cat survives by being thin, unnoticed and without any inner life that could be wounded. The speaker's ideal is therefore not courage but emptiness.
The poem matters because it shows, in about thirty lines, how euphemism and moral shrinking can feel like common sense. Its humour keeps pulling the reader in, and the final picture leaves a quiet question hanging over the whole joke: what is left of a person who has made himself lean enough to slip through everything?