Hiring someone to tidy your thoughts sounds like a joke, and Dave Bonta's six-line poem plays it with a straight face. A speaker is going over their accounts, a worry-making chore, so they pay a girl to comb their head. By the second stanza the result has arrived: "no angers / mining my head / I slept." The poem's idea is that mental unrest can be handled like a household job, and that when it is, sleep follows. Whether that is a comfort or a small absurdity is left for the reader to decide.
The vocabulary comes from money and work. "Examining my accounts" suggests ledgers, but "accounts" also means the stories we tell about ourselves, and "keeping accounts" is what people do with grudges. The speaker then "employs" a girl, a flat, managerial verb for something as intimate as having your hair combed. The title, "Head cleaner," sounds like a line in a job advertisement. It also echoes the product that cleans the heads of tape players, which hints that the mind is a machine whose parts get clogged and need servicing. I take that as a possible overtone of the phrase, not a fixed meaning. The girl is never described or named. She is a function, and that coolness keeps the poem from sentimentality.
The most satisfying detail is hidden in plain sight: "mining" is already inside "examining." The first line plants the word that blooms in the second stanza, so examining the accounts turns into something being mined from the head. Both words suggest digging for value, or for trouble. A comb and a mine work in opposite ways, though. A comb draws things out of the hair and leaves it smoother, while a mine hollows ground out. The poem sets them side by side without comment. It also leaves open whether "mining" means digging, or means explosive mines, which would turn anger into a hazard buried in the mind.
"Angers" is an odd plural, because we normally treat anger as a mass, like weather. Counting angers makes them separate, almost like objects or pests, something a comb might catch or a miner might haul up. The sentence is also ambiguous. "No angers mining my head" can mean that no angers were digging at me. But with no punctuation, "mining my head I slept" can run on, so the speaker seems to sleep while the work goes on. Maybe the combing has done the mining. The lines refuse to settle, which suits a poem about settling down.
Sound and shape reinforce the sense of winding down. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. What it has is shrinking lines. Counting syllables, the first stanza runs about seven, five, four, and the second runs three, four, two. The poem gets shorter and quieter until it reaches "I slept," two syllables and a full stop of a sentence, with no adjectives and no comment. The form falls asleep along with the speaker. "Head" ends both the third and fifth lines, so the second stanza echoes the first like a repeated touch, a second stroke of the comb. The hard consonants of "accounts," "comb" and "slept" give the poem a dry, clipped feel, and the soft "m" and "n" sounds of "examining," "mining" and "my" hum underneath.
The poem is also notable for what it leaves out. We don't learn what is in the accounts, why the speaker is anxious, or what the girl thinks. Because the cause is missing, the reader's own worries slide into the gap. The poem manages to be funny and tender at once, since being cared for by a stranger is both a luxury and a little sad. The speaker pays for peace and gets it, and the poem doesn't say whether that is a bargain.
Its significance lies in this compression. In six short lines it turns the idiom of bookkeeping into a portrait of an anxious mind and its release, and it makes the form carry the effect. Only a single clear action is given, and the reader supplies the rest.