In under thirty words, Dave Bonta's poem manages to puncture spiritual ambition, admit to hunger, and shrug. A speaker takes stock of his own "Zen," finds it meagre, and then turns his attention to lunch. The central idea is a gentle deflation. Enlightenment is a grand thing to claim, but what the speaker actually has is a modest, perishable, slightly comic inner life that runs out about as fast as a sandwich does.
The opening line is a small act of ownership: "my Zen is a thin Zen." The possessive "my" sounds proud, but the adjective undercuts it at once. "Thin" suggests watery soup, a flimsy excuse, a stretched resource. The sound reinforces the meaning, because "thin Zen" is a tight little echo of short vowels that seems to shrink as you say it. The word "Zen" then repeats, as if the speaker were testing it for weight. The second line, "a bargain Zen," adds the language of the marketplace. A bargain is cheap, and perhaps cheapened. Judging by this word choice, the speaker half-suspects that his spirituality is something picked up off a discount rack, a convenient label rather than a hard-won discipline.
The third line is the hinge: "I have nothing to do with it." It is also the longest and flattest line, with no imagery, only a blunt disclaimer. The sentence works two ways. On the surface, the speaker is distancing himself from the thin, bargain Zen he has just described, as though embarrassed by it. But "nothing to do" can also mean having nothing to *do*, no effort or doing at all, which fits the idea of non-striving that is often associated with Zen. So the line is both a confession of fraudulence and, quietly, a possible success. It also contradicts "my" from the first line. How can the Zen be his and yet have nothing to do with him? The poem never resolves this, and the tension is part of its charm.
Then the poem drops from the abstract to the ordinary: "I turn over my sandwich." The gesture is tiny and unglamorous. Maybe he is inspecting it, maybe flipping it to find the better side, maybe just fiddling with it while he thinks. The verb "turn over" even echoes how one might turn an idea over in the mind, so the sandwich becomes a stand-in for the Zen he has just been weighing up. The final line, "it will not last to supper," is wonderfully ambiguous because of that pronoun. "It" most literally means the sandwich, which will be eaten, or will go stale, long before evening. But after three lines of "it" meaning Zen, the reader can hardly help hearing the other meaning too: this thin, bargain spirituality will not last either. Impermanence, a central Buddhist idea, arrives here without any solemnity, delivered through the homely word "supper."
The form is as spare as the content. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters except the pronoun "I." Each line sits alone as its own stanza, so the white space around it acts like a pause for breath, or a moment of silence between thoughts. The lines run from about four to eight syllables, and the vocabulary is almost entirely plain and short, with "sandwich" and "supper" the only words of any length. This plainness is the point. A poem about an inflated spiritual claim would sound false if it were itself inflated, so the diction is kept as lean as the Zen it describes. The stanza breaks also give each line a deadpan timing, and the sandwich lands like a punchline.
The title, "Running on emptiness," plays on the everyday phrase "running on empty," which means being exhausted, out of fuel. Changing "empty" to "emptiness" turns the phrase toward the spiritual idea of emptiness as a source of strength, not a lack. The speaker may be depleted, or he may be powered by the void, and the poem leaves both readings open.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty and its humour. It resembles the compact, image-driven spirit of much Zen-inspired writing, though that is an inference from its brevity rather than anything the text states. Instead of claiming wisdom, it admits to a shortage of it and measures that shortage against a lunch. The result is a small, self-mocking poem that is more convincing than a grander one would be, because it does not pretend the mind is ever fully fed.