Five short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Fires" looks almost too small to hold an idea. It holds three, and it lets them catch light one after another. A morning is compared to a flame, a speaker tries to treat himself gently, and someone else turns out to be the source of the energy that gets him moving.
The first line, "morning like a small fire", is a fragment with no verb. It doesn't say what the morning does, only what it resembles, and the word "small" matters. This is not a blaze or a conflagration. It is the kind of fire you have to tend, a flicker you could easily lose, and it makes the start of the day feel modest and a little fragile. The title is plural, though, and only one fire is named, so the reader has to look for the others. The most natural candidates are the kindness the speaker asks of himself and the "spark" in the final lines.
The middle couplet is where the poem turns thoughtful: "I ask myself to be kind / for the truth is comical." The speaker doesn't command himself to be kind. He asks, tentatively, as if negotiating with someone who might refuse. The word "for" makes the second line the reason for the first, and the reason is surprising. We might expect kindness to be needed because the truth is painful or hard. Here it is needed because the truth is funny. The poem seems to suggest that our real situation, with all our small vanities and failures, is more absurd than tragic, and that the right response is to be forgiving and not harsh. Whether the kindness is aimed at the speaker himself or at others is left open, and the phrase "ask myself" leans toward the former.
The sound of the poem supports this gentleness. The hard *k* sound runs through it, in "ask," "kind," "comical," "spark" and "makes," and it has a small crackle to it, like kindling taking. "Kind" even sits inside the sound of "kindle," so the fire image and the moral image seem to share a root, at least to the ear. The *m* sounds of "morning," "myself," "makes" and "me" quietly link the opening line to the closing one. There is no rhyme, and the poem doesn't need any. Its rhythm is loose but purposeful. The line "I ask myself to be kind" is nearly iambic and rises steadily to its stressed last word. "For the truth is comical" trails off in a looser, almost tripping run of syllables, which is a good rhythm for a joke. The last line, "that makes me go," is made of three blunt monosyllables, and the poem simply stops there.
That ending is the most interesting choice. "Go" has no destination. It could mean get moving, set off, burst into action, or even "go" in the colloquial sense of being set off by something. Without an object, the word stays open, and the poem ends in motion and not in a conclusion. The grammar also repeats the opening. Just as the first line leaves out its verb ("morning *is* like a small fire"), the fourth line leaves out its own ("and in you *is* the spark"). Those two verbless lines frame the one stretch of the poem where the speaker actually acts and thinks. The sentence structure mirrors the emotional shape: a quiet fire, a moment of self-address, and then a sudden turn outward.
That turn is the arrival of "you." Up to this point the speaker has been alone with his morning and his conscience. The word "and" at the start of line four suggests the "you" was there all along, as if the speaker were adding the most important item to a list. Nothing in the poem says who this person is, and judging by the text alone, the reader can fill the gap freely. Notice also the reversal in scale. The poem moves from a fire to a spark, and a spark is the smaller thing, yet it is what starts a fire. The poem implies that the small morning flame may itself come from this spark.
What makes "Fires" worth reading is its economy and its tone. It puts humor, tenderness and gratitude into a handful of plain words, and it never explains itself. A truth that is "comical" is a disarming idea, and a spark that sends someone off into the day is a warm one. The poem asks the reader to hold both and to supply the rest.