Most confessions try to bring something into the light. Dave Bonta's "Evasions" does something stranger: it confesses, and shows in the same breath how the confessing is being dodged. In four short couplets, a speaker admits to a handful of habits (idling, paying attention to strangers, writing, taking photographs) and lets us see that each one is a way of not facing something else. The central idea is that the things we do most openly, even the things we call art, can be hiding places.
The first couplet sets the terms. "I have wants / under other names" makes desire sound like a fugitive living under aliases. We never learn what the wants are, and that silence is part of the point. One possible reading is that the rest of the poem is a list of the aliases: idleness, attentiveness, writing and photography might be the "other names" the wants now go by. That is an inference, but the poem's structure invites it.
The second couplet, "I believe in idleness / I attend to strangers", sounds like a creed. Idleness is treated as a faith rather than a failing, which is a small act of self-justification. "Attend" works two ways. It means to pay attention, but it also means to wait on someone, as a servant does. Strangers make safe subjects because they ask nothing of us and know nothing about us. Attention aimed outward is attention not aimed inward.
The construction is plain and tightly controlled. There are four couplets, no rhyme, and no punctuation at all. Every couplet starts with "I" in the present tense, so the poem reads like a deadpan ledger of admissions. Most words are short and ordinary, which gives the voice a calm, matter-of-fact tone and makes the odd moments stand out. The syntax also shifts halfway through. The first two couplets simply state ("I have," "I believe," "I attend"), while the last two add purpose clauses ("to become," "to hide"). Once the speaker starts explaining motives, the truth begins to leak out. The line breaks help: "to hide" ends its line, and only then do we learn what is being hidden. "Satisfied" hangs alone at a line end before we find out with what.
The third couplet is the quietest and perhaps the funniest. We expect someone to write in order to express something or discover something. Instead: "I write to become satisfied / with what I said." The verb "said" is in the past tense, so writing arrives after the fact as a way of reassuring oneself. "Satisfied" also quietly answers the "wants" of the opening couplet. The poem suggests writing doesn't fulfil a want so much as manage it, producing the feeling of satisfaction without necessarily providing the thing itself.
The final couplet gives the poem its only physical image, and it is a vivid one. "The hubbub in my eyes" is a surprising phrase. "Hubbub" is a noisy word, with its doubled, bouncing *b*s, and it describes a crowd or a din. Eyes are normally silent, so putting noise into them suggests an inner turmoil that is visible to others. Raising a camera covers the eyes, and the act of looking becomes a way of not being looked at. Photography, usually a way of seeing, becomes a mask. It is telling that the poem reaches a concrete picture only at the very end, after three couplets of abstraction, as if it has finally stopped circling.
What makes "Evasions" worth reading is that it enacts what it describes. It is a piece of writing, and its neat, balanced couplets could be an example of "writing to become satisfied with what I said." The title works as a key, making us suspicious of every line, including the confessions. Even admitting to evasion can be a form of it, since owning up to one hiding place may distract from the others. The poem never settles this, and that uncertainty is where its force lies. In eight short lines it gives a believable portrait of someone who is honest about being dishonest and still unwilling to say what the wants actually are.