Dinner, a play, mad love: it sounds like a perfect evening, and Dave Bonta begins "Existentially" by stopping it just as it ends. The opening phrase, "after dinner and a play / and mad love," hangs from the word "after" with nothing to hold on to. There is no verb and no main clause, only a gap. The title offers to fill it, but "Existentially" is an adverb, and an adverb needs something to modify. The reader has to supply the missing action: after all that, we wonder, we ask, we feel, existentially. The poem is about the moment when pleasure runs out and larger questions walk in.
The opening list is carefully ordered. Dinner belongs to the body, a play to culture, and "mad love" to something beyond control. The break after "play" delays that last item, so "and mad love" lands like a confession tacked on at the end. The word "mad" matters, because love that unseats reason also unsettles the self, which is exactly what the second stanza worries about.
"who to be / whom to happen to" is the strangest moment in the poem. Grammatically it is exact: "who" fits after "be," and "whom" follows the preposition "to." That tidiness sits oddly beside such a loose, enormous question. The two verbs pull in opposite directions. "To be" suggests choosing and inventing yourself, while "to happen to" suggests things simply befalling a person. The second phrase also works two ways. It can mean which person events should befall, or, since "mad love" has just been mentioned, which person I should happen to, as a lover turns up in someone's life like an accident. Either way, the speaker sits between agency and chance and does not say which one rules. "Happen to" also sounds slightly clumsy, as if the poet were trying on the idea of being an event rather than a person.
The last couplet turns on "Zen in new clothes." Zen suggests acceptance and letting go of exactly the questions the previous lines raised. "New clothes" suggests fashion, so calm becomes something bought, worn and updated each season. Judging by the tone, there is a wry smile here, aimed at the speaker as much as at anyone else. The phrase could also describe the poem itself, an old kind of wisdom dressed in a modern outfit of lowercase lines and missing punctuation. Then comes the final pun. "Content" can be stressed on the second syllable (satisfied) or the first (what is inside something). Set beside "clothes," the word invites a second reading: are we satisfied, or are we only the stuff inside the new garment? Spoken aloud, the poem has to choose one meaning, but on the page both survive.
The form is as spare as the thought. There are three unrhymed couplets, and only the title is formally capitalized (the lines themselves capitalize just "Zen," a proper noun). The lines shrink from seven syllables to three, three, five, four and four, so they read like breaths or notes jotted down. Rhyme is replaced by a quiet vowel echo, the long "oo" of "who," "to," "to" and "new," which gives the middle of the poem a murmuring unity. The poem's twenty-two words contain only one verb that carries any weight, the repeated infinitive "to be" and its cousin "to happen." Even the final "are" has no question mark behind it. "are we content" could be asked, stated or sighed, and the reader must choose the tone. That choice mirrors the poem's theme: nobody hands us the punctuation of our own lives.
What makes the poem worth reading is where it puts the big questions. They do not come from misery. They come after a good meal, a night out and a rush of love, when nothing is wrong and the mind has room to ask what it all adds up to. The pronoun change also matters. The two middle lines are impersonal infinitives with no one attached, and then "we" appears, pulling the reader in. The poem does not answer its question. It leaves us in that quiet interval after the evening, still wondering whether the calm we feel is the real thing or just something new to wear.