Five short lines, fifteen syllables, no capital letters and no punctuation beyond a single apostrophe: Dave Bonta's "Shrink/age" can be read in a breath, yet it keeps opening up afterwards. On the surface, a speaker addresses the morning and asks to be changed, and asks that something happen to "my father's house" too: it should "come home / to a tent." Underneath, the poem treats diminishment as something to be welcomed, not feared.
The title does a good deal of the work. The slash cuts "shrinkage" into "shrink" and "age," so the word is itself made smaller, split into parts. "Shrinkage" is an ordinary, almost laundry-room word, the thing wool does in a hot wash. Prising it apart reveals the other meaning inside it, the slow contraction of a life. The poem never mentions old age directly, but judging by the title, that is the shrinking in question: a body, a self, a world getting smaller.
The grammar is just as loose. "o morning" is an apostrophe, the old gesture of addressing something that cannot answer. "change me" is a complete plea in two words, and notably it asks to be changed, not spared. Then the missing punctuation lets the last three lines slide in several directions. Perhaps the speaker asks to be changed along with the father's house, and both will come home to a tent. Perhaps "come home" is a second command, aimed at the morning itself. Perhaps the house is what comes home, as though a house were only a tent that had briefly forgotten what it was. The poem never chooses, and the reader ends up holding all three.
The central contrast is between the two dwellings. "My father's house" sounds solid, inherited and permanent, and the phrase may carry faint scriptural echoes, though that is an inference from its wording and not something the poem states. A tent is its opposite: thin, portable, a shelter that expects to be packed up. Yet the poem does not present the move from one to the other as a fall. The verb is "come home," a phrase with warmth in it, and it is the tent, not the house, that is named as the place of arrival. The suggestion is that the house was a kind of detour, and that a smaller, lighter and more temporary way of living is where the speaker truly belongs. Even the choice of "morning" matters. It is the hour of beginnings, and a tent is a place you wake up in with the light coming straight through the cloth. The request is made at the one moment of the day that promises a fresh start.
The sound and shape of the poem support this. There is no rhyme, but the lines have a clear contour. They run three, two, five, two and three syllables, so the longest line sits in the middle, exactly where the father's house stands, and the poem then pares itself back to "come home" and "to a tent." It builds the house and dismantles it within five lines. Soft consonants hold it together: the m of "morning," "me," "my," "home" and "come" is a low hum, close to a lullaby. "come home" also chimes inwardly, with its two vowels leaning on each other. Against all that softness, the poem ends on "tent," a short word shut by a hard t, like a flap being fastened for the night.
What makes "Shrink/age" worth reading is how much it does without argument or explanation. Many poems about ageing mourn, and many others console. This one does neither. It asks for the change, and it treats the loss of size and permanence as a return. Its ambiguity is not carelessness either. The absence of punctuation is what lets "change me," "come home" and the tent all belong to one gesture. For a student, it is a useful lesson in how little a poem needs: a divided title, one long line among short ones, and an ending that is both a reduction and an arrival.