Twelve words, two lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Ad hoc" gives a reader almost nothing to hold, and that scarcity is how it works. It asks a question that usually takes a whole memoir to answer. Can a person write themselves, or are we always partly what got left on the cutting-room floor?
Start with the title. "Ad hoc" is Latin for "for this", and in English it means something improvised, made for one occasion and not meant to last. Read it as the poem's first line and everything after it comes under its shadow. If the self is "ad hoc", it is assembled on the spot, provisional, open to revision. The title also describes the poem itself, a small thing thrown together for the moment, with no apparent ambition to be a monument.
The two lines are built as a pair. Each opens with the same three words, "where to be", a plain case of anaphora, so the second line seems to promise an echo and then breaks it. The first line is long and stately: "the author of myself" has a slow, almost confident rhythm, and "author" carries the weight of authority, of someone in charge of a story. The second line is shorter, about six syllables against the first line's nine, and it shrinks the first line's ambition. "This out-take" arrives like a trapdoor. The poem has no rhyme to resolve it, so the drop in length does the work a rhyme might have done, and the sentence ends sooner than we expect.
The small words matter as much as the big ones. Both lines use "where" where we might expect "how" or "who". "How to be the author of myself" would be a question about technique; "where" turns it into a question about place. Is there somewhere a person can stand and be self-authored? The syntax adds to this uncertainty. There is no main verb, only the infinitive "to be", so the lines read like a fragment of a longer sentence we never get, or like a thought caught halfway. Nothing is stated outright. The poem leaves a hope and a doubt hanging side by side.
Then there is "this". In the first line the self is "myself", reflexive and inward. In the second, the speaker points at something with "this", as though holding up a frame of film or a rejected take. That gesture creates an odd double vision. The speaker is the writer, the thing written, and the discarded version, all at once. An out-take is a moment that was recorded and then judged unfit for the final cut, so calling oneself "this out-take" suggests a life that does not match the polished version one would like to present. The hyphen is a small detail worth noticing. It holds "out" and "take" together while keeping them visibly apart, a bit like the divided self the poem describes.
The sounds are quiet but not accidental. The open vowels of "author" and "out-take" link the two lines, even though the ideas they stand for are opposed: the one who decides what stays and the thing that gets cut. "Be" is repeated in both lines, so the central verb of existence stays fixed while the predicates around it change. Being, the poem seems to say, is constant. What we are being, author or leftover, is the open question.
What makes so slight a poem worth reading? Part of the answer is compression. It makes a large idea, that identity is both something we compose and something that happens to us, fit in the space of a breath, and the reader has to do the rest. It is also honest about uncertainty. A more grandiose poem might claim authorship of the self outright, or lament its loss. This one only asks where such a thing might be possible, then answers with its own disarray. The ad hoc, unfinished quality of the lines is the poem's argument as well as its subject: a self, like a draft, is always still being cut and put together.