Nobody tells a clock to "go away" the way you would tell a noisy child, and that small misjudgment of tone is the poem's whole trick. In five short lines Dave Bonta turns the most impersonal thing in a room, a machine that counts, into a tiresome companion who has overstayed its welcome. The twist is that the clock is not on the wall. It is "within me."
What that inner clock is can be read several ways. It might be the body's own rhythm, the pulse that keeps going whether we want it to or not. It might be the habit of watching the hours, the low hum of deadlines and schedules we carry around after the bell has stopped ringing. The word "weary" complicates things further. A clock cannot be tired, so the speaker's own exhaustion has been lent to the machine. The result is a double fatigue, a person worn out by time and a timekeeper worn out by keeping it. The title, "Timekeeper," appears nowhere in the poem itself, and the word has two edges. A keeper tends something, but a keeper can also hold something captive.
The construction is stripped to the bone. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem reads like a thought half-muttered in the dark rather than a statement prepared for an audience. The first line is the longest and the most flowing, with its gentle stresses on "weary," "clock" and "within." Then the poem clips itself. "enough" gets a line to itself, and its single word works as both a sigh and a slammed door. "go away" follows with two heavy, nearly equal beats, plain and almost childish. The line breaks do the work that punctuation would normally do. They make us pause where the speaker pauses to take a breath, and the pause after "enough" feels like a wait to see whether the clock will obey.
The stanza break is a small silence, and the second half changes direction. "where I was promised school / they taught me sleep." The syntax is slightly off-balance. "Where" opens a place without ever naming it, and the sentence arrives at its verb only in the last line. "School" has no article, so it is less a building than an idea, the whole promise of being taught something. The verbs set up the irony: "promised" suggests brightness and growth, while "taught" delivers the opposite. The sounds support this. "School" and "sleep" begin with the same hiss, and their long vowels, the "oo" and the "ee," seem to slow the line down. The last line is four one-syllable words, and it drops like a lid.
The poem never says how the two stanzas connect, and that gap is where the reading happens. One possibility is that the inner clock is something school installed, the discipline of bells and timetables, and that the lesson learned was not curiosity but a kind of dulled, obedient drowsiness. Another is that "sleep" points toward the final sleep, so that the weary clock is a body running down and the poem's real subject is mortality. The command "go away" then becomes more ambiguous, because it could be a plea for rest or a refusal to be reminded of the end. Judging by the imagery alone, the text supports both, and a third reading, in which the speaker simply wants permission to stop counting and rest, fits just as well.
The poem is significant because of how much it holds with how little it uses. It is funny, since the scolding of a clock has a deadpan, domestic comedy. It is also sad, because the voice sounds worn down rather than angry. The disappointment in "promised... taught" is bitter without a single bitter adjective. A reader can finish it in seconds and still be turning it over afterward, asking what exactly was promised, who broke the promise, and whether sleep is a failure of education or its truest subject. Poems this brief can easily seem slight, but this one trusts plain words and a few well-placed breaks to carry an idea about time, learning and exhaustion, and it leaves the last decision to the reader.