Anyone who has been told to "manage" their time knows the fantasy behind the phrase: that hours are objects we can sort, schedule and control. Dave Bonta's poem takes that fantasy, shrinks it to eight lines, and lets it fall apart in a surprisingly happy way. Its central idea is that we cannot beat time or run it like an office, but we can move with it.
The opening couplet is odd and funny: "out of a stick person / I make a new enemy." A stick person is the simplest figure we can draw, barely a person at all. Making an enemy from one suggests building a flimsy target just to have something to fight, much like a straw man. Because the poem is about time, the figure might also stand for the hands of a clock, or for the self flattened into a to-do list. The poem never says which, and that openness is part of its charm. The verb "make" is worth noticing too. The speaker doesn't meet an enemy but manufactures one, so the conflict with time is self-invented from the start.
The second couplet turns that enemy into "a seer," someone who sees ahead, and time is the thing that moves toward the future. The speaker asks, "how to trust such a seer / with the management of lead." The question has no question mark, as if it were half muttered. "Lead" is the most slippery word in the poem, and it can carry several meanings at once. Lead is the heavy metal of dull, "leaden" hours. It is also the graphite of a pencil, which fits the sketched stick person. Judging by the imagery, it may also recall alchemy, the old dream of turning lead into gold, or the lead weights that once drove clocks. Read as a verb, it hints at leadership, the managerial language of the title. The poem doesn't choose among these meanings, so the line feels both heavy and playful.
The alchemical reading gains support from the third couplet: "I was so ready / to alter the present." The word "alter" sounds like transformation, and "the present" is a quiet pun, meaning both the current moment and a gift. The grammar matters here. The first couplet is in the present tense ("I make"), but now the speaker says "I was so ready," in the past. The ambition is already over. We hear the tone of someone who had a plan, perhaps a grand one, and has since changed their mind.
The last couplet is the surprise: "the clock and I danced / all night." The enemy has become a partner. Dancing is a way of being with time rather than against it, since a dance is all rhythm, a body keeping pace with a beat much like a ticking one. Nothing is managed, and the night simply passes. The line break after "danced" slows the reading before "all night" arrives, so the phrase seems to last a long time.
The poem's form suits this change of heart. It is free verse in four couplets, with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. Without full stops the sentences slide into one another, and the lines read as one drifting thought. The short lines add to this, and the closing couplet is the quietest and plainest of all. Although there is no rhyme, the poem has its own sound patterns: "stick," "such" and "seer" share an *s* sound, and "make" and "management" echo each other in the first two couplets, so the ear catches a faint pattern even as the sense wanders.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so few words. It borrows the dry language of workplace efficiency, shown in the title, and turns it into a small fable about conflict and surrender. It also avoids preaching. We are never told to relax or to live in the moment, and the lesson comes only through the image of a dance. That lightness is why the poem stays in the mind. It asks us to see our daily fight with the clock as something we have partly invented ourselves, and it suggests that this fight might end in a dance.