Dave Bonta's "Late riser" takes a slightly sheepish label and makes it strange. Sleeping in sounds like a small, comic failing, but here the speaker's late waking becomes a problem of direction and identity. He cannot simply get out of bed. He does not know where "up" is, or whether he should go into the day or over it. The central idea is that waking is not a switch but a disorientation, and that a mind surfacing from sleep can feel like a stranger in its own landscape.
The first line sets up the confusion with a paradox: "a morning born in the evening." Mornings are supposed to belong to the start of the day, so a morning that arrives in the evening is misplaced, like a calendar page torn out and pasted in the wrong spot. "Born" adds the sense of a newborn's helplessness. Nothing in the poem is capitalised or punctuated, so the whole thing runs as one unbroken stream of thought, with no full stop to tell us where one idea ends. That suits the subject. The poem itself seems not quite awake, still without its capital letters and full stops.
The most playful moment comes at the line break: "I am not yet up and out / of my mind I am in doubt." Read at the end of line two, "up and out" is the ordinary language of getting going in the morning. Once the next line begins, the phrase tips into "out of my mind," the idiom for madness. Then the sentence turns again, and "of my mind I am in doubt" becomes "I am in doubt." Because there is no punctuation, the reader must choose where the phrases break, and each choice changes the meaning. The reader ends up slightly muddled too. This is also where the poem's only rhyme falls. "Out" and "doubt" chime at the ends of consecutive lines, so the sound ties not being *out* to being *in doubt*.
That pairing points to the poem's most important pattern, its small spatial words. "In" appears four times: "in the evening," "in doubt," "in or over," and "lost in." "Up," "out" and "over" each appear only once. The speaker is surrounded by enclosure, while the ways of escaping it are scarce, and the grammar carries the sense of being stuck. The short line "how to rise" works like a hinge. At three syllables it is the briefest line, almost a hesitation, and "rise" does double duty. It is what a person does from bed, and it is what the sun does, though this speaker's sun is rising far too late.
The final image is the oddest. "The body of land I am lost in" borrows the shape of "body of water," so the ground itself becomes something to be immersed in. Judging by the imagery, this could be the world outside, the day ahead, or the speaker's own sleepy body felt as a terrain, and the poem does not choose. The earlier line, "in or over," offers two ways of meeting that terrain: wade into it or climb above it. The word "or" holds out a choice, but neither option is taken.
The poem's last word is "in," a preposition with nothing after it. The sentence ends on "I am lost in," and the missing object leaves the grammar as lost as the speaker. Nothing in the language comes to rescue him. A poem about being unable to find the way out ends by failing to find its own way out of a sentence.
What makes "Late riser" worth reading is how little it uses to do this. In six short lines, with no punctuation and one rhyme, it turns a familiar morning grogginess into something unsettling and quietly funny, and it does so through syntax and word choice rather than explanation. We feel the speaker's fog because the poem's grammar is foggy too. It is a small piece, but it shows how much a line break or a stray preposition can do.