Dave Bonta needs only five lines to walk away from the oldest argument there is. "In the war of good and evil / I pick one side," the speaker announces, in the voice of someone about to take a stand, and then the stand turns out to be somewhere else entirely. The side chosen is neither good nor evil but "the pageants, the show." What sounds like a moral declaration is really an aesthetic one, and the central idea sits in that swerve. The speaker would rather give loyalty to the spectacle of the world than to the abstract thinking that sorts it into camps.
The title sharpens the joke. A "partisan" is a committed supporter, and the word can also mean an irregular fighter who operates outside the official army. Both senses fit a speaker who sounds fiercely loyal and yet is loyal to something as unwarlike as a parade. The grammar plays along. The colon after "side" works like a drumroll, promising a weighty answer, and what arrives is a short, almost shrugging list. "Pageants" is plural and "show" singular, as though spectacle comes in many forms and also as one great performance. The poem never says what these pageants are. Readers are free to fill them with festivals, crowds or the changing light of a day, but that picture is ours, not the poem's.
The last two lines are harder and more interesting. "Poor thought is a locked door, / a quiet morning." "Poor" can mean impoverished, meaning thinking that is thin, lazy or merely habitual. It also carries a faint note of pity, as in "poor thing." The two images then pull in opposite directions. A locked door is a barrier, so poor thought shuts you out. A quiet morning is something most of us would welcome. Judging by this pairing, the speaker may be divided. Either dull thinking leaves you standing outside with nothing happening, which is why the show is the better choice, or not-thinking has a peace of its own that the speaker admits to being tempted by. The poem doesn't decide, and the open question seems part of its point.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, but the line lengths do deliberate work. The first line is the longest, with a stately, almost proclamatory eight syllables. Then the poem contracts. "I pick one side" is blunt, three heavy monosyllables in a row that land like a gavel. "The pageants, the show" is lighter and looser, and the last line, "a quiet morning," ends on an unstressed syllable so that the voice trails off exactly as the phrase describes. There is also a subtle sound pattern. "War" in the first line and "poor," "door" and "morning" at the end share a vowel-plus-r sound in most accents, so the poem finishes by echoing its opening word in a gentler register. The war is not argued down so much as faded out.
The imagery follows the same path. The poem begins with the large public vocabulary of war and sides, then passes through the theatrical language of pageant and show, and ends in a doorway and a morning, small domestic things. It moves from battlefield to threshold, from the crowd to a single person waking up.
The poem is short, but it is significant for what it declines to do. It refuses the habit of treating every question as a contest between two teams, and it does so with wit rather than a lecture. It is also self-aware. A poem is itself a kind of show, so choosing "the pageants" is partly a choice of poetry itself, and a poem that mocks poor thought is still doing some thinking of its own. It can be read as escapism, and the phrase "poor thought" suggests it knows this. That leaves students with a useful question: what do we gain, and what might we lose, by stepping out of the argument to watch the parade?