Dave Bonta's "Good morning" is seven lines long, and in that space it sets out on a voyage, glimpses royalty, and comes home to a marriage. The title is a greeting in quotation marks, and the poem answers it by starting with the lowercase word "morning", as though the speaker is still half-awake and replying mid-yawn. What follows reads like the drifting thoughts of someone who hasn't yet decided whether they are in the real world or a nursery rhyme.
That second possibility seems deliberate. "Going to sea in a tub" has a bouncing, sing-song rhythm, with the stresses falling on "sea" and "tub". It is hard not to hear the old rhyme about three men in a tub. The next line has the same lilt: "going to SEE a KING be a KING". Nothing rhymes in the usual sense, but the poem is full of small echoes, and it behaves like a children's verse that has wandered into adult life. The tub could be a clumsy boat, or, if we read it with a morning in mind, a bath. The poem never says which. That ambiguity is part of its charm, because the grand idea of a sea voyage and the humble business of getting washed sit in the same phrase.
The most important device is the pun on "sea" and "see". The first "going to sea" is a journey. The second, "going to see / a king be a king", is a spectacle. The third, in the last line, is "longing to see my wife". One sound is used three times, and each time it shrinks the scale. We begin with an ocean, move to a monarch, and end with one particular person. The line break after "going to see" matters too. For a moment the reader waits to learn what will be seen, and the poem answers with a tautology, "a king be a king". This is a funny, slightly mysterious phrase. It might mean someone simply being fully what they are, without pretending, or it might hint at the speaker's own sense of being master of the morning.
Then comes "or at least", the pivot of the poem. It is a small deflation, the speaker quietly lowering his ambitions, and it is the only moment where the tone turns wry. Instead of a king we get "singing in the garden". Here the sounds do the work. "King", "singing" and "longing" all share that ringing *-ing* ending, and "king" differs from "sing" by a single letter. The poem seems to be saying that a king and a singer are closer than they look. The grammar also stays loose. Is it the king singing, or the speaker? Without punctuation or capital letters, the lines slip from one thought into the next, and the reader decides who is in the garden.
The final word, "wife", is the plainest in the poem, and it comes last. Everything before it, the tub, the sea and the king, now looks like a playful detour. The speaker's real destination is a person, and the feeling that drives the poem is "longing". That word is warm without being sentimental, because the poem has kept its tone light and a little self-mocking until then. The opening hedge, "I believe I may be", belongs to the same tone. Even the speaker is not quite sure what he is up to, but he is sure of what he wants.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. In very few words it shows how a mind can turn an ordinary morning into an adventure, and that the adventure can be a way of approaching love. It does not announce its emotion. It lets wordplay and rhythm carry it, and it trusts the reader to notice that the last "see" is the one that matters.