Who is taking whom out to dinner? In four short lines, Dave Bonta turns an ordinary evening meal into a date, and the surprise is that the speaker is not the one in charge. "My tongue / took me to dinner." The grammar hands the tongue the role of host, the one who chooses the restaurant and picks up the invitation, while the person it belongs to tags along as the guest.
That reversal is the poem's central idea. We usually think of the tongue as a tool we use, for tasting and for talking. Here it behaves like a separate creature with its own appetites, and the speaker relaxes into being led. The final line, "as always," makes this a long-standing arrangement. The speaker has never been fully in control of this partner, and doesn't seem to mind.
The title, «Date», sets up the joke before the poem begins. A date is a romantic outing, so the first line's "tongue" takes on a faint flirtatious charge, since tongues are not only for eating. The word has other possible meanings too, from a point on the calendar to a sweet fruit. Whatever the guillemets are doing around it, the romantic sense is the one the poem plays on. The comedy is that this is a date with oneself, or with one part of oneself, and the poem presents it as perfectly normal.
The tongue is also the organ of speech, so the poem can be read as being about language as well as food. A tongue that "took me to dinner" may be the voice that leads the speaker into situations, conversations and perhaps into poems. The verb "dance" supports this reading. A tongue moving around food dances, but so does a tongue moving through speech, and dance suggests something pleasurable, improvised and not entirely planned. Eating and talking happen in the same small space of the mouth, and the poem lets them overlap without pointing out the overlap.
The construction is spare and carefully balanced. There is no rhyme, and the poem is in free verse, but the syllable counts are neat: two, five, five and three. The two middle lines match in length, while the opening and closing lines are shorter, so the poem swells and then shrinks back. The opening "My tongue" is almost a pause, two beats that name the subject and leave it hanging before the second line completes the thought. The sounds help too. "Tongue" and "took" share a hard, tapping start, and "dinner" and "dance" echo each other with their d's, which ties the meal to the movement. Even without rhyme, the lines feel linked.
The third line is the most interesting. "I eat, let it dance" has no conjunction between its two actions, so the phrases sit side by side. It is easy to hear a shrug in it: I eat, I let it dance, no big deal. The speaker is not describing a grand evening out but a routine in which the mouth does what it does, and the person goes along. The line also changes grammatical direction. In the second line the tongue is the subject, doing the acting, while in the third the speaker takes the subject position with "I eat" and then immediately gives the initiative back with "let it dance." The speaker seems to take control only to hand it over again.
Then comes "as always," which ends the poem quietly. After the lift of "dance," the last two words are plain and slightly deflating, like a person admitting to a harmless habit. The humor depends on that flat tone. The poem never exclaims or explains. It treats an absurd situation, being taken out by your own tongue, with complete calm.
Its significance lies in how much it gets from so little. In under twenty words it suggests the body's independence from the mind, the closeness between eating and speaking, and the comedy of treating yourself as company. It also shows how a small shift of grammar, making the tongue the subject and the speaker the object, can make something familiar look strange. After reading it, you may notice your own mouth at dinner and wonder who is really leading.