"Escapism" is an odd title for a poem in which nobody seems to be running from anything. Escapism usually sounds like a charge: someone dodging duties, hiding in daydreams. Dave Bonta's speaker simply walks "to where / I have nothing to do", and the poem asks whether that emptiness is a refuge or a trap. Its central idea is that going far enough to be free of obligation may also take you too far to return.
The construction is spare. Eight short lines fall into four couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters except the lone "I". Nothing rhymes. The poem relies on repetition and on a loop. It opens with "a far walk" and closes with "too far / to walk it all back," so the speaker ends up bound by the same words he started with, now turned from invitation into problem. Even the grammar loosens as it goes. The first couplet is a plain statement, but by the end the syntax has slipped into something more ambiguous.
The sound of the opening matters. "A far walk" puts two stressed syllables side by side, so the line has to be taken slowly, like the effort it describes. The line break after "to where" leaves the reader hanging for a moment before "I have nothing to do" arrives. That phrase is made entirely of small, flat monosyllables, and its plainness is part of its force. Nothing to do sounds like relief, but it also sounds like a void.
The second couplet is the strangest. "Out of body" gives the title its literal meaning: the mind has slipped its moorings, and the walk has become a kind of drifting. Then comes the poem's sharpest turn: "words take no notice of me." We expect a poet to be the one who notices words, gathers them and puts them to work. Here the relationship is reversed, and language, like everything else, has stopped making demands. There is a quiet irony, though. The poem exists, so words must have noticed the speaker at least a little. Perhaps they only turn up once he stops trying to summon them.
The third couplet is a list of possibilities that never become facts: "I could be industrious / or in love." The modal verb "could" keeps both states hypothetical. The pairing is also telling. Work and love are the two things that most obviously fill a life, and the poem sets them side by side as equivalent alternatives to nothingness. "Industrious" is a long, busy, four-syllable word, and it stretches the line before the short, almost shrugged "or in love" ends it. The speaker seems to be looking back at the lives he could be living from a place where neither claims him.
The final couplet turns on a small oddity. The line reads "thought I go too far," where we might expect "though." That could be a slip, or it could be deliberate. If we read "though," the sentence is a concession: even though I go too far, I can't return. But "thought" leaves another possibility open, that thought itself is what goes too far. That would fit a poem about leaving the body behind, since the mind is what has wandered off. I would treat this reading as a suggestion, not a certainty, but the line supports both. "Walk it all back" also echoes the modern idiom for retracting a statement. The speaker can't undo the walk, and perhaps can't unsay or unthink what the walk has led to either.
The poem never says whether this is sad or freeing, and that is its achievement. A reader can hear relief in "nothing to do," or loneliness in the words that ignore the speaker, or quiet alarm in the closing line. In a few dozen words it captures a feeling most people know: wanting to get away from everything, and then discovering that "away" has a distance you can't easily measure or cross back. Its brevity enacts that experience. It offers little ornament and gives no explanation, and it leaves the reader standing at the end of the walk, with the same question about whether to turn around.