Hardly anyone hears the violence in "killing time" anymore, and Dave Bonta's poem works by hearing it again. It takes the idiom at its word and follows it like a small crime story: a death implied, a charge of treason, a burial. In under thirty words it never says whether killing time is a sin or a release, and that uncertainty is where the poem lives.
The first couplet is calm. "we change / from morning to afternoon." The subject is "we", not the clock or the sun. We usually say that time passes, but here the people are the ones who are altered, as if morning and afternoon were rooms we walk between. There are no capitals and no punctuation, so the voice sounds like someone noting an ordinary day without fuss.
Then comes a verb from the courtroom: "adjourn to the road / our chance meeting." To adjourn is to postpone a formal session or move it somewhere else. A "chance meeting" is by definition one nobody scheduled, so it can't be called to order, let alone adjourned. The mismatch is funny, but it also does some work. "Meeting" means both an encounter and an official gathering, and the poem lets the two meanings rub against each other. The word order is also slightly twisted, with the verb first and its object trailing behind. The sentence loiters, which suits a poem about idling.
The third couplet turns abstract: "in the meanwhile / which is like treason against the now." "Meanwhile" is the word for the stretch between things that count, the waiting room of a day. The poem accuses it of treason, which is betrayal of one's own side. That makes "the now" a kind of state demanding loyalty, and anyone who drifts through the meanwhile is a deserter, always looking toward what comes next. Yet treason is also what people commit against rulers they refuse to obey, so the line can be read as sympathetic, with the clock as the tyrant. "Which" is slippery too. It might point back to the meanwhile itself or to the whole business of wandering off to the road. The poem doesn't settle it. Notice how this line is the longest in the poem and ends on its smallest, hardest phrase, "the now", which closes like a door.
Look, too, at how the time words shrink. "Morning to afternoon" covers half a day. "Meanwhile" is a gap. "Now" is a single point. The poem narrows from the big public units of the clock toward the moment that can hardly be held.
The last couplet is the strangest. "burying in the churchyard / the church." The line break sets a trap. A churchyard is where we bury the dead, so "burying in the churchyard" leads us to expect a body. What arrives is the building itself, the container laid in the ground it contains. A church is a place we associate with bells and fixed hours, so one reading is that scheduled, institutional time is being put to rest. Another is that the murdered time of the title needs somewhere to go, and the poem gives it an absurd, ceremonial grave. The verbs run from killing to treason to burying, the stages of a crime and its cover-up. The "burying" has no stated subject at all, which leaves us wondering who is doing it.
There is no rhyme, and the poem is free verse arranged in four tidy couplets. That visual order is gently undercut by the sense, which keeps slipping sideways. Small sound echoes hold things together: the soft m and n of "morning," "afternoon," "meanwhile" and "now," and the repeated "church" in the last two lines. The second "church" shrinks to a bare "the church," the shortest line in the poem, and it lands like a spadeful of earth.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much argument it packs into so little space. It asks what we owe the present moment, and it declines to moralize. The chance meeting on the road might be the treason, or it might be the one thing that rescues the day from the clock. A reader finishes unsure which, and the poem has made the idiom "killing time" sound a little more serious than it used to.