Six lines, three couplets, not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's "Cutaway" is small enough to take in at one reading, yet it makes a large claim about what deserves our attention. The loud, public account of the world, the news, matters less than a kiss, a crow's cry, and the unedited experience of travelling through a day.
The first line plays a quiet joke on a familiar saying. "A kiss is more mighty / than the news" has the shape of "the pen is mightier than the sword", but both terms have been swapped. The weapon becomes an intimate gesture, and what it defeats is no longer violence but information. "Mighty" sounds slightly old-fashioned, almost biblical, beside the flat modern word "news", and that mismatch gives the line its dry humour. The line break helps. "Than the news" sits alone on a short line, small and deflated, as if the news has already been cut down to size. The poem also starts with a lowercase "a", so the claim is dropped into the air like a passing remark rather than announced.
The second stanza turns from declaring to listening. "I hear words dissolve" suggests sugar vanishing in water, language losing its solidity. Because it follows the line about the news, we may take these to be the words of public speech, though the poem never says so. Then comes the crow, which will "unravel an anthem". "Unravel" belongs to knitting, so the anthem becomes a woven thing, a communal fabric of tune and words, and the crow's harsh voice tugs at a loose thread. The sound of the line does the same work. "And a crow unravel an anthem" is the longest line in the poem, and its run of light syllables (un-rav-el-an-an-them) trails off like yarn coming loose. The line is also pleasingly ambiguous. The crow might be picking apart a human anthem, or its own cawing might be the anthem, and either way the human script loses to the bird.
The last couplet draws the poem's two threads together. "Journal" and "journey" are near-twins in sound, and both words go back to the idea of a day. A journal is a daily record and a journey was once a day's travel. The poem puts them side by side and then removes the gap. The journal is made "out of" the journey, not about it, as if the experience were itself the paper and ink. "Whole" matters too. Nothing is selected or tidied for the record, and the plain, steady rhythm of "out of the whole journey" settles after the stretched line before it.
The title gives these lines a second meaning. A cutaway in film interrupts the main action to show something else, and a cutaway drawing slices an object open to reveal its inside. Both senses seem to fit. The poem cuts away from the headlines to a kiss and a crow, and it opens up a day to show what it is made of. There is a small tension here, though. The poem cuts away the news in order to keep everything else, "the whole journey".
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines swell and contract at the pace of ordinary speech, which suits a poem about preferring the immediate to the official. The verbs also trace a small arc. The poem begins with a judgment (a kiss *is* mightier), moves to perception (I *hear*), and ends in action (I *make*). Its argument is that we can listen, notice, and then turn the noticing into something of our own.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not lecture us about information overload or tell us to switch off. In six unpunctuated lines it suggests that we decide what counts as a record of our lives, and that the kiss, the crow, and the unfolding day have a better claim than the headline.