"Managing expectations" is the language of meeting rooms and project plans, a phrase for telling people politely not to hope too much. Dave Bonta borrows that flat, administrative voice and points it at something unmanageable, a kiss. The opening instruction, "ask a kiss to wait / till further orders," is funny because a kiss is the least obedient thing imaginable, and it is poignant because the speaker seems to mean it. The poem is about deferral, about what happens to desire and grief when they are made to stand and wait. Its answer is surprising. Waiting here is not suppression but labour, a kind of cooking, and the result is a richer love.
The form is as restrained as its advice. Four unrhymed couplets, with lines of only a few syllables, leave the poem looking like a set of instructions. There is no punctuation and no capital letter anywhere, and that absence matters. The commands arrive without full stops, so the reader has to decide where the sentences break. "Further orders" also sounds military, so the kiss becomes a soldier on standby, a second institutional register layered over the corporate one in the title. Both registers make feeling sound like something to be administered, which is exactly the pressure the poem pushes against.
The second couplet changes voice. After the imperative comes something closer to a proverb: "he who must come in hope / will go to wrack." The rhythm turns slow and solemn, and the sounds help, with the long o of "hope" answered by "go." "Wrack" recalls the old phrase "wrack and ruin," and it is also a word for seaweed and debris thrown up by the sea. Either sense suggests that the person who arrives full of hope, demanding an immediate result, is the one who ends up wrecked. The verb "come" may also carry a flicker of physical urgency, though that is a reading rather than something the poem insists on. The warning stays general and unexplained, which gives it the weight of received wisdom.
Then the poem turns on its hinge: "see all the grief / put to work loving." Because there is no punctuation, the lines can be read two ways. Grief is put to work, like a labourer given a job, or grief is seen already at work in the act of loving. Either way, grief stops being something to be ashamed of or got rid of. It becomes a workforce. This quietly answers the title. Managing expectations here does not mean lowering them, as in the corporate sense. It means finding a use for the energy that waiting and loss produce. The verbs "put to work" connect back to "orders," so the same managerial vocabulary that began as comic distance now describes something tender.
The last couplet is the strangest: "like a cook's conquest / of the eyes." It is a simile with no obvious partner, and the poem does not say which earlier thing it describes. The likeliest candidate is the grief turned into love, or the kiss withheld until it matters more. A good cook wins people over before the first bite, by colour, steam and arrangement, and the meal is better for being delayed. The hard k sounds of "cook's conquest" give the line a bite, and "conquest" brings back the military note, though now with pleasure rather than command. The poem ends on "of the eyes," its shortest line, as if the image dissolves into looking. After a poem of orders, it finishes by inviting us to see.
Part of what makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It mixes the language of offices, armies, proverbs and kitchens, and none of these fits comfortably, so the friction between them makes the feeling. It also declines to explain itself, and the unresolved simile asks the reader to work, as the grief in the poem is working. What it offers is a small, unsentimental philosophy of patience. Wanting something badly does not entitle you to hurry it, and the waiting, handled well, is part of how the thing gets made.