A poem about toilets sounds like a dare, and Dave Bonta takes it up with a straight face. His untitled piece, marked only by three asterisks, is a string of small scenes, each set in or around a bathroom. The subject is not really plumbing. It is the odd honesty of the one room where nobody can keep up appearances. Dignity, grief, technology, loneliness and our uneasy relationship with nature all show up there, and the poem treats them with the same shrug.
The opening stanza sets the tone. A host's "brand-new bathroom" has "perfect" feng shui, yet the mirror "fogs up immediately," and the carefully designed calm blurs over in a moment. The second stanza is stranger. "Not to sound callous, but / what I remember most is / how large & soft her guest / towels were." The apology suggests that something sadder lies behind this memory, though the poem never says what. Grief or distance seems to have been pushed onto the nearest soft object, and the speaker is embarrassed by it. The ampersand and the hesitant line break after "but" make the voice sound like someone talking, not performing.
That conversational manner holds throughout. The poem is in free verse with no rhyme, and its lines are short and plain, closer to spoken asides than to song. Its diction swings between "crapper," "pissed" and the childish "potty," and the swings are part of the joke. The old man in the "ultra-modern men's room" who "stands there looking all over / for something to push" is funny, but he is also touching. Technology has outpaced him, and the poem watches without mocking. Then comes a graffito that "might just / as well have read, / 'Everybody Meditates.'" We are left to guess what it actually said, which is part of the humor. The stall becomes a place of accidental stillness.
The mood darkens in the library scene. Someone "reeking of body odor" moans and howls "with abandon" in the only stall, and the speaker's response is to piss "as quietly as I could." Whether the person is in distress or in ecstasy, we never learn. The speaker offers neither judgment nor rescue, only awkward courtesy. The "John" stanza then spirals into a bleak little biography: the boy "will get shat on," lose his girlfriend, and end up "paying / for anonymous sex." The name works on three levels, as a common name, as slang for the toilet, and as slang for a sex worker's client. The poem lets the pun grow into a whole joyless life.
From here the poem widens. A millipede "coils, uncoils" in a spider's web, a small trapped life observed in a moment of private waiting. Then comes the image of "three million households in New York City" each with "an intermittent stream / flowing through it," a phrase that turns every flush into a hidden creek running through the city. The next stanza makes the contrast explicit, with children at a "back-to-nature jamboree" who "independently decided" to squat in the creek. The word "independently" is quietly funny, since nobody needed to be taught. The speaker's own back-to-nature fantasy, a composting toilet softened by a "New Age desktop fountain," pokes gentle fun at the way we dress up what is natural.
The poem ends on three lines that read almost like a haiku: "The old privy. / A turd falls in. / No sound of water." After so much running, fogging and fountaining, the water motif that links the stanzas finally goes silent. The ending is crude, precise and oddly peaceful, and its blunt phrasing ("A turd falls in") refuses any euphemism.
The poem matters because it handles a subject we usually avoid with real attention. Its fragments, with their shifts between comedy and sadness, suggest that private moments are where we are most exposed and most alike. The asterisks for a title fit this, as though the poem were one more scrap, easy to overlook, and the poem keeps insisting that such scraps are worth noticing.