Sitting still ought to be the easy part. Yet the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Mindless" doesn't just sit: he or she "endeavor[s] to care / for nothing." That one formal, slightly pompous verb gives the game away. Endeavoring is hard work, and hard work is the opposite of what the speaker claims to be after. The poem is built on this small comedy of effort. Trying not to think, not to care, turns out to be a very busy form of thinking.
The phrase "care / for nothing" is also doubly turned by the line break. Read straight, it means to be indifferent to everything. But "care for" can also mean to look after, so for a moment the speaker seems to tend nothing as if it were a houseplant. And "for nothing" can mean pointlessly, in vain. The poem never picks one meaning, and the title, "Mindless," stays similarly slippery. It can sound like a goal, since it is the reverse of "mindful," a word we hear constantly in talk about meditation. It can also sound like an insult, which the middle stanza seems to confirm.
That stanza is the strangest: "vast as a drunk / in the nasty end / of a nasty room." The simile is odd, because we don't usually think of drunks as vast. Perhaps the point is how a slumped, sprawling body seems to swell and fill whatever corner it has settled into, or how drink makes a person feel limitless while being stuck in one spot. Either way, the image turns the speaker's attempt at serene emptiness into something unflattering. The mind has become a bar's back corner. The repeated word "nasty" does a lot of the work here. It sounds like slurred, looping speech, the way a drunk repeats himself, and it also suggests a mind going round in the same sour groove. Meanwhile the lines grow slightly longer, from four syllables to five and five, as if the mood is spreading out and settling.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has three tercets with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. The lines are short and uneven, running from three to six syllables, and the first stanza has a lopsided shape of short, long, short. The compression feels a little like a haiku, though it follows no syllable pattern. The lack of punctuation matters most in the last stanza, where each line hangs on the next, with no full stop to say when a thought is over. The effect is a drifting, unforced pace that fits the subject, even though the content is full of strain.
That last stanza also supplies the answer. "Growing dark / till supper and / the garden call" moves from the inner room to the outside world. "Growing dark" could describe the evening, the speaker's mood, or both, and the poem lets them overlap. The key word is "till," which turns the whole sitting session into a stretch of time with an end. And the end is not reached by will. Nothing in the speaker's effort makes it stop. It is interrupted by ordinary appetite and by the garden, both of which "call." The line "till supper and" is left dangling on its conjunction, and that small suspension is where the poem turns. Then "call" lands as the last word, a summons. The grammar is slightly ambiguous too, since the garden might be calling in the sense of a pull, or a bird, or just a job waiting to be done. In any case the poem ends outside the speaker's head.
That ending is what gives the poem its quiet significance. It does not scorn the wish for stillness, but it is honest about how hard stillness is, and it is funny about it. The attempt to care for nothing collapses into a sulky, drunken image and then is rescued, gently, by the things the speaker does care about: food, dusk, soil. Judging by the shape of the poem, the lesson is not that emptiness is impossible, but that we are pulled back toward life whether we plan it or not. In twelve short lines, it makes a gentle joke about trying too hard, and it finds a modest grace in being called away from it.