Twelve words are enough for Dave Bonta's "Office work" to cover a commute, a workplace and a verdict. The speaker heads off to the office, and what he produces there is a turd. The central idea is that desk labour can feel less like making something than excreting something, a bodily, joyless and faintly shameful process whose only output is waste. The final phrase adds that this waste is made of suffering.
The first line, "up and to the office", has no capital letter, no punctuation and no verb. It starts mid-motion, as if the speaker were already being carried along, the way a commuter is. "Up" could mean out of bed, up in a lift or up the career ladder, and the poem leaves the choice open. Each of these suggests a routine in which things simply happen in sequence ("up and to"), without any decision. Notice too that "I" does not appear until line two, and only when the verb of real action arrives.
That verb, "hatch", is the poem's best joke. We normally hatch eggs, which means patience, warmth and new life. We also hatch plans and schemes, and an office is where plots are supposed to be dreamed up. Both senses promise something productive. Hatching is also a sitting-down activity, so the image of a person perched motionless at a desk, warming something, fits office work almost too well. Then comes "turd", a blunt, one-syllable word with no euphemism, and the promise collapses. The drop from life-giving to lavatorial is bathos in its purest form.
Yet the poem doesn't end on the crude word. "Of affliction" lifts the register sharply. "Turd" belongs to the playground, while "affliction" sounds scriptural. The phrase "bread of affliction" is familiar from the Bible and from Passover tradition, and Bonta may faintly echo it, though the poem doesn't insist. A related hint sits in "office" itself, which has an old religious meaning in the daily "office" of prayer. If we hear that, the commute becomes a grim parody of devotion, and the day's duty a penance. The grammar of "of affliction" is also slippery. The turd might be caused by affliction, made of it, or be the very shape that the speaker's misery takes. Whichever we choose, the product is useless to everyone, including its maker.
The poem's shape reinforces this. The lines run roughly six syllables, three, then six, so the poem pinches in at its centre, where "I" and "hatch" sit alone, and swells again at the end. That short middle line works like a held breath or a strain. There is no rhyme, but there is quiet sound-patterning: "office" and "affliction" share their soft *f* sounds, so the first and last lines echo each other. The workplace and the suffering are tied together in sound before we consciously register the link. Between them, the hard consonants of "hatch" and "turd" land like small thuds.
The tone matters as much as the imagery. Nothing is shouted and nothing is explained. The speaker doesn't complain about a boss, a salary or a deadline, and he gives no details of the job at all. That blankness lets any reader supply their own version of the grind, which is one reason so short a poem can feel so widely applicable. The humour is also a way of coping. Making the misery ridiculous and a little disgusting avoids self-pity, but the last word is still "affliction", and the joke has a sore spot underneath.
That is what makes the poem worth studying. It shows how much a few word choices can carry. Change "turd" to "seed" and you have a motivational poster. Change "hatch" to "make" and you lose the double meaning of life and scheming that the ending sours. In three lines, Bonta turns a routine morning into a small, sharp satire of what work can do to a person. You can read it in five seconds, and it takes much longer to shake off.