Most poems about loneliness at night count what is missing. Dave Bonta's six lines notice who turns up instead. "My past comes with me / in lieu of my wife / to bed": the speaker doesn't go to bed alone, exactly, but with memory in the place where a person should be. The second stanza adds the consequence. The nights are growing longer than he can sleep, so the hours stretch on, and the past has plenty of time to talk.
The poem never says why the wife is absent. She might be dead, away, or estranged. The text gives no answer, and it would be a mistake to invent one. That silence is part of the effect. Because the cause is withheld, the reader meets only the condition: a bed, a night, and a mind that won't switch off.
The most striking choice is the phrase "in lieu of." It belongs to contracts and receipts, the language of substitution and payment, and here it is set beside the most intimate of subjects. The register is dry, almost bureaucratic, and that dryness works as understatement. The speaker sounds like a man who can't afford to sound grief-stricken, so he reaches for a cool, formal phrase, and the coolness makes the loss feel heavier. The past is a poor replacement, a bad bargain, and he knows it.
The line breaks add to this. "In lieu of my wife" is a complete thought on its own, and for a moment it seems the wife has simply been swapped out. Only then does "to bed" arrive, a short, flat fragment that closes the stanza like a door. The second stanza ends the same way: "than I / can sleep." The break strands the pronoun "I" at the end of a line, alone, and that mirrors the speaker. The word that has to carry the whole sentence sits by itself on the edge of the page.
The sound of the poem is quiet but not accidental. There is no rhyme, which suits a poem about things failing to resolve. But a long "i" sound runs through the key words: "my," "wife," "nights," "I." The self and the lost partner are linked by sound, as though the vowel keeps circling back to the person who is missing. Each stanza also follows a pattern of two fuller lines of about five syllables followed by a very short one, "to bed" and "can sleep." Each stanza seems to run out of breath, and the brevity of the last line enacts the tiredness the poem describes.
The time words reward a second look. "Nowadays" is casual, the kind of word people use when complaining about getting older, and it quietly says this is a change. Things were not always like this. "Become" suggests a gradual process rather than a sudden break: the nights did not turn long overnight but have been lengthening. Set against "past," these words build a small timeline inside six lines: then, a shared bed and presumably easy sleep; now, a slow worsening.
The title, "In the small hours," holds a paradox. The small hours are the time just after midnight, when everything feels reduced and quiet. Yet the poem insists these hours are not small at all; the nights are "longer than I / can sleep." The comparison is a clever choice. The night is not measured against the clock but against the speaker's own capacity to sleep. Time here is felt, not counted. A night is long when you cannot get through it.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It uses plain words, no striking metaphor, and no show of emotion. The one figure of speech, the past as a bedfellow, is almost slipped in. Yet it captures something many readers will recognise: memories are not only things we visit, they can also arrive uninvited and lie down beside us. By stopping at "can sleep," the poem leaves us in the dark with its speaker, and the unfinished feeling of that ending is the point.