Almost everyone has been told at some point to "act your age," usually as a scolding. Dave Bonta's six-line poem turns the phrase inside out. If age is something you act, it is a role, and the questions become who the performance is for and in front of whom we can drop it. The poem's answer is a dog.
The first couplet sets up the relief: "I have no lies for a dog / no alteration but play." "Lies" is a heavy word for something as mild as behaving like a grown-up, and it hints that grown-up manners are a small, habitual dishonesty. A dog doesn't care how old you are, so there is nothing to hide. "Alteration" is the more surprising choice. It sounds like a tailor's word, a garment taken in or let out to fit, and it suggests that with other people we adjust ourselves to the right size. With a dog the only adjustment is "play," which moves the speaker toward himself rather than away.
Then the poem turns on a parallel. "For a dog" becomes "for others weary / as office business." The repeated "for" lines the two audiences up against each other. The simile can be read two ways: the others are as tired as the routine they work through, or they are weary of that routine. The missing punctuation lets "weary" drift between the people and their work. Either way, weariness belongs to the adult world, and "business" carries a faint echo of busyness, of never being still enough to play.
The last couplet is where the poem earns its keep: "I play the age tune / and keep time." "Play" returns, but its meaning has changed. In the first couplet it meant romping and fooling around. Now it means performing, both a piece of music and a part. The same word serves two worlds, freedom for the dog and obligation for everyone else, and the poem lets the pun do the arguing. The "age tune" sounds like a stock melody that everyone already knows, the expected moods and manners of a certain number of years. The speaker doesn't compose it. He plays it. "Keep time" works twice as well. A musician keeps time by holding a steady beat without showing off, and we also keep time in the sense of clocks, office hours and the slow count of years. The word "keep" adds a note of duty, even endurance.
The form supports this. The poem is three couplets in free verse, with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capitals except the pronoun "I." That keeps the voice quiet and conversational, so the musical language arrives late and stands out. The lines also shrink as they go, from about seven syllables in the first two to five, then six, then five, and finally the three-syllable "and keep time." The poem tapers like a tune being tapped out with a foot until only the beat is left. There is a soft pattern of sound as well. The long "a" in "alteration," "play" and "age" links the dog's freedom to the age that restricts it, and "lies" and "time" share a long "i." The two worlds feel like they belong to one speaker.
The tone is what makes the poem more than a clever reversal. The speaker doesn't rebel, and he doesn't sneer at the tired people around him. He plays along, and "keep time" has a certain dignity, the steadiness of someone who knows the beat and stays on it. Judging by the text, he sees age less as a number than as a rhythm he agrees to follow in public, with a private place, the company of a dog, where he can fall out of step.
The poem's lasting interest is how much it gets from a pun and a handful of plain words. It leaves the reader with a small, uncomfortable question about which parts of our own behaviour are playing and which are acting.