Change one word in a very old phrase and you get this poem's whole argument. "The way of all flesh" is the familiar idiom for death as the common fate, and Dave Bonta's title trims it to «The way of some flesh». Death is no longer a single road but several, and the six short lines that follow try to say which road the speaker is on, and which one they are not.
The first stanza answers with a list: "my way is the way of sand / the way of ash / the way of ruin." The repeated "the way of" sounds like a slow drumbeat. The self gets only one word, "my", in the opening line. After that the speaker disappears into the list, as if the "I" were already breaking up. The three nouns are carefully ordered. Sand and ash are materials that cannot hold a shape. Sand suggests slow erosion, and ash is what remains after burning, which also recalls the funeral phrase "ashes to ashes". "Ruin" is a different kind of word. It describes what happens to something built, such as a house, a city or a life. So the list moves from a substance to an aftermath to a condition, and nothing in it is consoling.
The second stanza turns on a flat "not": "not the way a body turns / all alone / into amber." Amber is the poem's one image of the opposite fate, and it is seductive. It is fossilised tree resin, golden and translucent, and it can hold an insect intact for ages. A body in amber would be preserved, beautiful and visible. The poem names the price in two words, "all alone", and gives them a line to themselves, so the loneliness is physically isolated on the page. The phrase is ambiguous. It could describe the body sealed off from everything, or the manner of the change, a private transformation that happens to one body and to no other. Either way, the contrast with sand and ash is sharp. A grain of sand means little except among other grains, and ash drifts and mixes with soil and air. Crumbling, the poem implies, is at least a way of staying in company.
The word "all" repeats this idea. It is cut from the title's idiom and then returns in "all alone", where it is attached to solitude instead of to everyone's shared fate. This may be coincidence, but the effect is of universality traded for isolation.
The form supports the argument. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letter, so nothing in the poem is polished or monumental. The two three-line stanzas are lopsided in a revealing way: the first runs seven words, then four, then four, while the second runs six, then two, then two. The second stanza narrows as its sentence runs across the line breaks, and it ends on "amber". The poem's last word is the thing it refuses, so the golden image lingers in the ear after the rejection. "Way" appears five times, and the repetition makes death sound like a path walked rather than a moment suffered.
The tone is hard to pin down, which is part of the poem's interest. "Not the way" could be relief, a refusal of vanity and of the fantasy of being kept forever. It could also be envy, a quiet recognition that amber is lovelier than ruin. The speaker does not say. That restraint feels honest, since the lines accept decay without dressing it up as peace.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few words. It takes a worn idiom and makes it strange, and it sets two fates against each other through concrete materials rather than abstract talk of mortality. It also suggests that the more attractive ending, preservation, may be the lonelier one. Reading the poem's own spare, unmonumented lines as a small heap of language, closer to sand than to amber, is an inference. It is a tempting one, because the poem seems to practise the humility it describes.