Seven times the speaker announces "Election Day morning," and seven times the announcement leads nowhere near a ballot box. There are no candidates, no polling place and no opinions. Instead we get an owl, a bar of soap and a pile of toenail clippings. The gap between a loud public occasion and a quiet private morning is the engine of Dave Bonta's poem, and it runs on that gap from start to finish.
The construction is simple and strict in one respect: seven three-line stanzas, each opening with the same line. That repetition works like a drumbeat, or like the date written at the top of every diary entry. It also becomes quietly funny. The more often the phrase returns, the less it seems to matter, because whatever follows ignores it. The "haiku" in the title is a loose label. The poem borrows the form's short lines, concrete observations and habit of ending on a small image, but not its syllable count. The refrain alone runs to six syllables, and the second lines stretch longer. There is no rhyme either. The poem's music comes from sound and texture, not from matching line endings.
The images begin with the body. "Lascivious dreams" is a gloriously over-ripe phrase, and the owl's "quaver" shrinks it at once. A night bird is still calling in the morning, which suggests the speaker has not quite crossed from one world to the other. Next come the "small toothmarks / all over my soap." Something has been gnawing in the bathroom, and the poem never says what. Leaving the culprit unnamed gives the stanza its charm, since a tiny mystery has crept into the most ordinary place in the house.
Time keeps going wrong. The factory whistle "seems / to go on forever," so a signal meant to mark the hour stretches past its limit. Then comes the wristwatch, "six days / & four hours behind." The precision is comic, and the ampersand makes the voice sound offhand. The speaker knows exactly how far out of step he is and has done nothing about it. On a day defined by a deadline, when polls open and close, he is wearing a clock that has abandoned the calendar. The poem never explains the watch, and it doesn't need to.
Between these come two more private moments. The toenail clippings in a "neat little pile" are the most domestic image in the poem. The adjectives sound faintly self-satisfied, as if sorting one's own trimmings were a modest victory of order. Judging by the contrast with the refrain, it is the one thing on this morning that the speaker can fully control. The woodpeckers "banging their heads" are funnier still. Set beneath a line about an election, the image invites a wry reading: effort repeated hard, with a sore head as the likely result. The poem never says this, so the reading stays an inference, but it is hard to ignore.
The sounds are worth noticing. The poem is full of noise: the screech and quaver of the owl, the whistle, the banging, and finally the "clatter of acorns." Those hard consonants echo one another across the stanzas, and they make the morning feel busy even though nobody is doing anything important. The last stanza turns fully outward. Gray squirrels "forage in the oaks," and the speaker disappears from the picture. The acorns suggest autumn and the squirrels' ordinary work of gathering. The creatures go about their business, unconcerned by the date.
What makes the poem significant is how much it says by leaving things out. It is a political poem by omission. It never says whether the speaker will vote, or whether he cares, and the repeated refrain makes us feel the missing subject like a gap in a tooth. Readers can take the speaker's drift toward owls and soap as evasion, or as a kind of calm. Either way, the poem reminds us that even the biggest public days still have to be lived by one person in one house, with a stopped watch and a curious squirrel outside.