Six short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and yet Dave Bonta fits two separate disappointments inside them. The title announces the subject, the breaking of a spell, and then the poem opens with the word's opposite: "who today enchants me". With no question mark, the line hovers between a real question and a shrug. Who, these days, could possibly charm me? The title has already supplied the answer: nobody.
The speaker's reason sits in the next two lines: "with my weary head / full of accounts". The word "accounts" works in two ways. It suggests ledgers and sums, the dull arithmetic of being responsible, but it also means stories, versions of events. Either way, the head is "full", a container with no room left. Enchantment needs some empty space to arrive in, and this mind has none. A quiet sound-link underlines the point. "Enchants" and "accounts" end on the same clipped "-nts", so the thing the speaker wants and the thing that blocks it rhyme faintly across the stanza, almost like a joke at the speaker's expense.
The lack of punctuation also makes the middle line slippery. "With my weary head" can be read backward, as if the speaker's own tiredness is the tool that someone would have to enchant him with, or forward, as a description of the state he is in when he asks the question. The line belongs to both readings. The speaker is at once the person who wants to be charmed and the obstacle to it.
The second stanza turns from the present to the past. "Again" suggests this is a habit, a trip made over and over. "Journey / home / to yesterday" is the poem's strangest and best phrase, because home here is a time rather than a place. The vocabulary of the first stanza (weary, accounts, home) hints at the end of a working day, though that is an inference, since the poem never says where the speaker has been. What matters is the direction of travel. When the present offers nothing, the mind retreats to the past, the usual consolation of nostalgia.
The poem refuses that consolation. "That sorry peak" is a small masterpiece of deflation. "That" points across a distance, almost dismissively. "Peak" suggests yesterday was a summit, a high point worth returning to. But "sorry" undercuts it, and it carries two meanings at once: pitiful, and regretful. Seen from today, the summit looks shabby, or perhaps the speaker feels sorry about it. Disenchantment here reaches backward and spoils the one place left to retreat to.
The shape of the poem supports this. The lines run six, five and four syllables in the first stanza, then five, five and four in the second. Each stanza tapers and finishes on a short line, "accounts" and "peak", so both tercets seem to run out of breath. There is no rhyme to tie things off, and the last word is a single stressed syllable that lands flatly, like a step onto ground that isn't there. The two stanzas also mirror each other. "Today" in the first line is answered by "yesterday" in the fifth, with "day" as the hinge, so the poem questions the present in one stanza and the past in the next. Both come up empty.
That symmetry may be the neatest joke in the piece. A poem about a head full of accounts is itself a kind of account, tallied in two columns, today and yesterday, with the same result in each. The tone matches: dry, understated, without a single exclamation or complaint. The speaker does not rage at the loss of wonder, only records it.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows how much can be done without rhyme, punctuation or ornament, because small words such as "again", "that" and "sorry" carry all the attitude. It also names a feeling most people will know, the tiredness in which even memories stop comforting. The poem offers no cure, and it ends on the sorry peak, leaving the reader to decide whether the spell can be recovered.