Dave Bonta's six-line poem borrows its title from the language of gyms and self-help, then spends the rest of its length pulling that language apart. A "weight-loss program" promises tidy, measurable change. What the poem delivers is closer to a vow: the speaker will become thin by handing the body over to a road. The gap between the brisk, almost bureaucratic title and the strange, ritual-like text is where both the poem's dry humour and its darker undertow live.
The first couplet sets the terms: "to become thin / I wed my bones to the road." Marriage is the poem's boldest metaphor. A wedding implies a public promise and a permanent union, and the old formula "till death do us part" hovers just behind it. The speaker also marries their *bones*, not their body, and bones are what remains when everything else has gone. The thinness being pursued is already skeletal. Walking or running is never named. The road simply replaces the table, and what gets used up on it is flesh. The sounds support the idea: "bones" and "road" share the same long, hollow *o*, so the words seem bound together, and the plain, mostly one-syllable wording makes the vow sound flat and final.
The second couplet is the knottiest: "today's new yesterday / is a cross." The phrase folds time over on itself. Each day, once lived, becomes a yesterday almost at once, and the road keeps producing them in a line. The word "cross" can be read several ways, and the poem lets them sit together. A cross is a burden carried, a mark made to strike a day off a calendar, and the shape of two roads meeting. In the Christian tradition it is also an instrument of suffering. Judging by the imagery, the poem wants us to feel the dieting as daily penance, each finished day adding weight. That is a sharp irony for a weight-loss program: the days themselves get heavier as the body gets lighter.
Then comes the meal: "a dark and dirty supper / for the eyes." Hunger has not disappeared, only changed organs. With the stomach unfed, the eyes do the eating, and what they are given is "dark and dirty." It might be dusk, road grime, or something bleaker, and the poem doesn't say. That restraint is part of its force. The word "supper" also sits close to "cross," and the pairing nudges the mind toward the Last Supper and the crucifixion. This is an inference, not something the poem states. If it is intended, the meal is a communion in reverse, with dirt and darkness in place of bread and wine, served to the eye rather than the soul. The alliteration of "dark and dirty" gives the phrase a chewy, almost relishing quality, as if the speaker enjoys the taste of the words.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters except the "I." With no full stops, the poem runs on one breath and leaves the reader to decide where each thought ends. The line lengths shape the experience. The first couplet builds from a short line (four syllables) to a long one (seven). The next two do the opposite, each ending on a three-syllable stub: "is a cross," "for the eyes." The poem dwindles on the page as the speaker does. The "I" appears only once, in the second line, and after that the speaker vanishes into objects: a cross, a supper, a pair of eyes. By the end, the self has been thinned out along with the body.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It takes a trivial, modern phrase and shows what that phrase might hide: appetite, self-denial, mortality, and the old religious vocabulary of fasting and sacrifice. It does this without explaining itself, and the comic mismatch between the title and the text keeps it from becoming solemn. A reader can finish it in seconds and still be turning over "today's new yesterday" long afterwards.