Eight short lines, almost no capital letters and no punctuation at all, and yet Dave Bonta's "Living in the moment" holds God, the devil, happiness and death in one small garden. Its central idea is a quiet paradox: a man can be happy because he expects to die at any second. The title borrows a phrase we usually meet on mugs and in wellness apps, where it means "relax, stop worrying." The poem takes it literally, and the result is stranger and more serious.
The first stanza begins with a surprising comparison: "the Lord is as strange / as the devil". The poet does not say God is as powerful or as frightening as the devil. He says God is as *strange*. That word suggests unfamiliarity rather than morality, as if the divine and the diabolical were two equally unfathomable presences rather than opposing camps. Then the line break does something clever. "and me" can finish the comparison, so that the Lord is as strange as the devil and as strange as the speaker himself. It can also start a new thought: "and me, / I am a happy man." The poem never chooses, and both readings work. In the first, the speaker is part of the mystery, a puzzle to himself. In the second, he steps out of theology and into a plain statement about his own life. Either way, "I am a happy man" arrives with no exclamation mark and no argument, in the flat voice of someone who has stopped trying to explain.
The second stanza turns to action. "I play" sits alone on its line, and the verb is telling. He does not work, wander or sit, but plays, which is an activity done for its own sake and suggests something childlike. Given the Lord and the devil in the stanza before, it is tempting to hear Eden in "the garden," though the poem never says so and it may just be a garden. "Till night" gives the day a shape, and the judgment is ours to make, but night is an easy stand-in for the end of a life.
The last two lines carry the poem's real weight: "and every minute / expect to die." "Every minute" echoes the "moment" of the title and shrinks time to its smallest practical unit. The syntax is clipped, since the speaker drops the "I" before "expect," as in a diary entry or a telegram. That makes the expectation sound habitual rather than dramatic. There is no "fear," no "dread" and, importantly, no "but." The poem could have set happiness against death with a contrast word, and instead it joins them with "and." That small word is the poem's hinge. It appears at "and me" and again at "and every minute," linking ideas without ranking them. Happiness and mortality simply coexist.
The rhythm supports this calm. The poem is free verse, with lines of roughly two to five syllables, closer to speech than to any strict meter. The short lines make the reader pause at "and me" and "I play," and the poem feels as though it is being said slowly, with nothing to prove. There is no end rhyme, but there is a hidden one. The word "I" opens "I am a happy man" and "I play," and the final word, "die," rhymes with it exactly. The self and its ending are tied together by sound, so the "I" that is happy is quietly answered by the word that cancels it. A long "i" also runs through "night," which sits just before the end.
The poem matters because it takes a worn-out slogan and tests it against the one fact that gives it weight. Living in the moment sounds easy until you admit that the moment is all you are promised. Bonta offers neither consolation nor panic, only understatement, a mild tone laid over a huge subject. The reader is left with a question rather than an answer: what would it take to be happy under those conditions, and is the speaker's play a kind of wisdom or a kind of defiance?