Anyone who has lived through a clock change knows the small private disorientation it causes. The phone says one hour, the body insists on another, and for a few days the day seems assembled from the wrong parts. Dave Bonta's "Time change" compresses that feeling into four lines. Judging by the title, the trigger is the shifting of the clocks, but the poem is less interested in the clocks than in what they do to the person who lives by them. Its central idea is that when time slips out of joint, the self slips with it, and the sleepless night becomes a kind of companion.
The first couplet begins with a joke built from a worn-out phrase. "Old as my own hat" blends two familiar expressions, "old hat" (stale, tired) and the comparison "old as the hills", and shrinks the scale to something humble and personal. A hat is shabby and comfortable, shaped by one head only. The comparison sets a dry, self-mocking tone. It also sets up a paradox, because the thing called old is "the morning," which is normally the symbol of freshness. Add "at noon" and the morning seems to arrive late, or to overstay, or to be stuck in the wrong slot of the day. The line has no verb at all, so it names a condition and never describes an event. The reader gets the stale, unmoving feel of being tired, with nothing actually happening.
The second couplet turns to night, and the grammar becomes oddly sociable. "Me and the night" puts the speaker and the darkness side by side as equals, almost like two friends or two conspirators. Then comes the phrase that carries the most weight: "drawing up our unrest." The verb is slippery. You draw up a contract, a list of complaints, a plan, or a chair to sit beside someone. Each meaning fits. The speaker and the night seem to be drafting their shared restlessness like a document, or pulling their sleeplessness closer like furniture. The word "our" matters here, since the unrest belongs to both of them, as if the night were as unsettled as the person awake in it. "Unrest" also has a public, even political sense, which makes a small domestic insomnia sound like a minor uprising.
The form does a lot with very little. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme, so nothing closes the lines neatly. The lines run roughly five, five, four and six syllables, and the last one stretches a little longer than the rest, which suits a poem about time being pulled out of shape. The sound is quiet and repetitive. The round "o" of "old," "own" and "noon" gives the first couplet a heavy, drowsy feel, and the nasal "m" and "n" sounds recur ("morning," "noon," "me," "night," "unrest"), like a low hum. The poem also ends on "rest," the one thing the speaker lacks, with the prefix "un-" attached to it like a small refusal. Even the sentence structure is unfinished. Neither couplet contains a main verb, only the participle "drawing," so the action never completes. The poem stays in a present that goes on and on, as the sleepless hours do.
The two couplets also divide the day between them, one for morning and noon and one for night, so the poem covers a whole day in four lines. Yet the day it describes has no proper order, which is exactly what a time change does.
The poem is significant because it takes an experience so ordinary that we barely mention it and shows how strange it really is. It gets its effect through wit and restraint, not through grand statements, and it trusts the reader to supply the tiredness behind the words. Its humour also keeps the mood from turning self-pitying. Reading it aloud is worth the few seconds it takes. You can hear how the lines run down, almost like someone drifting off, and then stop short of rest.