Seven short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a title that seems to belong to a survival manual. Dave Bonta's "Self-preservation" instead offers a cradle, a street fire, a stone sage, a grumbling father and a quiet verdict about time. The poem's pleasure lies in working out why these things share a space.
The first stanza is built from three oddities, all hanging on one "who would". Without a question mark the line could be a rhetorical question (who would be so foolish?) or the start of a description, and that open edge is part of its charm. Each image is a small act of unreason. To "sit in a cradle" is to squeeze an adult into an infant's bed and ask to be rocked. To "burn coal in the street" is to take fuel meant for a hearth and set it alight in public, where it warms no one in particular. The third image, "an alabaster sage", is the strangest. Alabaster is the pale, smooth stone of carved figures, so this wise man is a statue who looks full of wisdom and can't answer back. The rhythm bends around him too. The lines run to roughly seven, five and nine syllables, and the long, four-syllable "alabaster" stretches the last line until it feels as heavy as the stone it names.
The second stanza turns suddenly human and speaks in the voice of a proverb. "A poor man making his moan" leans on the soft, humming m-sounds, and "moan" shares its closing n with "son" two words later. The next line is all hiss: "would send his son to sea," where send, son and sea slide into each other. The tone is flat and practical. A man complains, then solves the problem by sending the boy away. The poem doesn't say whether this is cruelty, necessity or hope, and the title makes us weigh the options. Is the father protecting his household, protecting himself, or trading his child's safety for his own comfort? Notice also that "would" has changed its meaning. In the first stanza it was hypothetical (who would ever?), but here it is habitual (a man like this would, and does).
Then comes the swerve. "But see how apt every man is / to forget time." The word "see" echoes "sea" from the line before, so the poem seems to turn our eyes from the story to ourselves. "Apt" is an old-fashioned word that means both "inclined" and "good at", and both senses fit, because forgetting is something we are skilled at. "Every man" also quietly absorbs "a poor man", so a single grumbler becomes a portrait of everyone. The last line is the shortest, only four syllables, and it ends on "time" without a full stop, as if the thought will keep going once the page has stopped.
The poem never explains how its parts connect, but they can be read together. Judging by the imagery, the cradle and the carved sage might mark the two ends of a life, and burning coal is a picture of something being used up. Each of the first stanza's actions ignores what time it is, like an adult acting as a baby or a person seeking counsel from something that can't age or answer. The father who sends his son away may be doing the same on a smaller scale, solving today's trouble and forgetting that a boy's years, like his own, are limited. Seen this way, "self-preservation" stops sounding heroic. It becomes the everyday habit of not looking at the clock, which lets us get on with living.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is tiny, but it makes the reader do the work of joining its images, and it turns a stock phrase into something slightly unsettling. By the end, self-preservation looks less like courage than like a gentle, widespread, useful kind of forgetting.