Picture a sign fixed to the fence around a reservoir, written in the flat, officious voice of "Attention shoppers" or "Attention passengers." Dave Bonta's "Poem for Display at a City Reservoir" opens in that voice: "Attention suicides: please have the consideration / to drown elsewhere." The shock lies in how mild the request is. The speaker doesn't plead or lecture. He asks for good manners. The humor is black and meant to be uncomfortable, and the poem soon shows it is aimed at something other than the people it addresses.
The first stanza heads off a practical objection before dismissing it: "It is not that your body / would be especially toxic — that's a myth." With the bureaucratic excuse gone, the real reason arrives in a single aphorism: "what we crave in water is an absence of taste, / not the taste of absence." The line is a chiasmus, the same two words swapped so that the meaning flips. An "absence of taste" is what we want from a glass of water, a clean neutrality we never think about. The "taste of absence" is what a death would leave in the most ordinary things, a grief that seeps into the supply. The verb "crave" is worth noticing too. It is a strong word for thirst, and it hints that the community's wants run deeper than clean tap water. "Consideration" does double work as well. It means politeness, but it also means thinking about other people.
The second stanza starts with the bathos of "Also," the tone of a notice's afterthought, and then the water bill: "kindly make sure your water bill is paid up. / It's the least you can do for your neighbors." The language of civic duty is almost absurd here, since the reader knows that a paid bill is the smallest of the debts being weighed. Then the vocabulary drifts. Neighbors will "need to recharge / their own reservoirs, those brown or blue pools." Brown and blue are the only colors in the poem, and they are common eye colors. Judging by the imagery, the reservoirs are eyes and "recharging" them means weeping. The city's water supply turns into a human one, made of tears.
The final image is the most delicate: pools "in which on occasion you may have glimpsed yourself, / smaller than life." The phrase turns "larger than life" upside down. It describes the tiny reflection a person sees in someone else's eye, and perhaps also the shrunken self-image of someone in despair. The suggestion is that the person addressed has been seen, and has appeared in other people's eyes without necessarily knowing it. The poem switches from the generic plural "suicides" to an intimate "you," and the notice stops sounding like a notice.
The construction supports this shift. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, built from two stanzas of five and six lines. Its long, prose-like lines and enjambments ("your body / would be," "your neighbors, / who will") imitate official sentences that run on without feeling. The dash adds a spoken aside. The first stanza ends on a clipped, quotable line, while the second ends on a short phrase that sounds like a hush. The soft, rounded "brown or blue" slows the voice just where the humor gives way to feeling.
Part of the poem's significance is that it takes a subject people usually approach with careful solemnity and goes at it through comedy, without being flip. The deadpan register gets past the defensiveness a direct appeal might trigger. By the end the joke has become an argument: a death is not private, and it changes the taste of a whole community's daily life. The poem also avoids easy comfort. It doesn't promise a cure or claim to understand despair. It simply says, in a voice dressed as a public sign, that you are held in other people's eyes. The poem never says who the speaker is, a city official, a neighbor or the poet, and that gap leaves the notice open to anyone who stops to read it.