Dave Bonta's "Microcosm" treats the self as a small world, and that world is coming apart. The speaker begins by "chopping myself down," and the count shrinks from two gardens to one to none. It reads like a slow erasure, as if the speaker is cutting away at their own inner life until nothing is left growing.
The images that follow blur body and nature. Oranges grow green on "the tree of my finger," which suggests something unripe or unfinished, a fruitfulness that never quite arrives. Then the tone darkens: the "labyrinth within me / is a bomb." The inner maze, usually a place of searching, becomes something that could explode. The closing lines widen out to "extreme" weather "without hope," as though the speaker's inner climate and the outer one are the same.
The mood is bleak, tense and claustrophobic. The speaker seems to feel self-destructive and trapped, though the poem hints at this through strange images rather than stating it outright.