Six short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and a surgeon is already in trouble. Dave Bonta's "Surgery" opens with an order, "pierce the surgeon," and the order swaps the roles the title leads us to expect. Surgery is something surgeons do to other people. Here the blade, never named but implied by "pierce," is turned on the person who normally holds it. Because the verb is an imperative, we are drawn in too, as if the reader were being handed the instrument.
The target is "his living clock," a phrase that carries more than one meaning. On the simplest reading it is the heart, the body's ticking mechanism. But a clock is also what a surgeon's working life runs on: operating lists, bookings, fixed hours. The next couplet supports this with "better than Wednesday next." That slightly formal phrase sounds like a note on an appointment card, a day when someone will be booked in and dealt with. The poem seems to set two kinds of time against each other: the administrative time of schedules and waiting, and the living time inside a body. Break open the second kind and what the speaker finds are "fine times," better, apparently, than whatever has been pencilled in for Wednesday.
The sound of that discovery matters. "Find fine times" repeats its f and its long i, and the sound seems to brighten, like a small pleasure turning up unexpectedly. The long i comes back in the final word, "wipe," which gives the poem a faint echo in place of a rhyme. There are no end-rhymes anywhere, and the lines are short, between four and six syllables, with a loose, speech-like rhythm. Hard consonants (pierce, clock, next, dispatched) keep the language crisp and clinical.
The last couplet is the coldest and the funniest. "To be dispatched" is double-edged: to dispatch something is to send it off efficiently, like a letter or a chore, but it can also mean to kill. The grammar leaves it unclear what is being dispatched. The infinitive could attach to the surgeon, to the "fine times," or to the whole procedure. That looseness feels deliberate, and I read it as a refusal to say who ends up on the receiving end. Then comes "with a little wipe." The diminutive "little" and the domestic "wipe" suggest cleaning a blade or a countertop, and the violence shrinks to housekeeping. The line has three light syllables before it lands on "wipe," so it moves like a flick of a cloth. With no full stop to close it, the poem simply stops, as if it too had been wiped away.
Seen as a whole, the three couplets follow the stages of an operation, and the three verbs make the pattern visible: pierce, find, dispatch. First comes the incision, then the exploration, then the tidying up. In effect the poem performs surgery on its own subject, using the surgeon's method against him. The images work the same way. "Living clock" fuses machine and flesh, and "pierce" and "wipe" bring the body and the cleaning cloth into one small space.
Whether the poem is a threat, a joke, a revenge fantasy or a dark meditation is left open, and that openness is much of its interest. Its tone is deadpan, and the deadpan is what makes it unsettling. The clinical briskness we might expect from medicine, in which a body is a slot in a timetable and a procedure ends with a quick clean-up, is applied to the professional himself. The poem suggests that everyone is on a clock, including the person who seems to control other people's.
What makes "Surgery" worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It reverses a power relationship, sets bureaucratic time against bodily time, and uses one ambiguous word, "dispatched," to hold efficiency and death together. It also shows that a poem with no rhyme, no punctuation and barely thirty words can still have a plot, a tone and a sting.