In just thirty-seven words, Dave Bonta's "Office worker" takes a person apart and shows what is left. The speaker is on his way to work, and by the last line the working day has turned into a small, quiet dishonesty. The central idea is that routine employment can hollow out the self until even the most intimate things, a marriage and a mind, feel provisional.
The structure carries much of this meaning. Six tidy couplets sit on the page like items on an agenda, but the sentences inside them keep slipping. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short, three or four syllables each, and the line breaks keep opening gaps. The poem begins in lower case with "to the office where", a preposition with no verb, as if the speaker were already in motion and never chose to go. This fits the verbs that follow, which are almost all "is": "my committee *is* a sail," "my wife *is*," "my mind *is*." The speaker describes states and does not act, until the final line.
The imagery is brief and strange. A committee is usually solid, a bureaucratic weight, but here it is "a sail." A sail has no power of its own. It fills with someone else's wind and carries the boat where the wind goes. A committee turns out to be a thing that moves you, and the possessive "my" begins to sound ironic. Judging by the imagery, the speaker feels carried along by talk and procedure rather than steering anything.
That "my" returns five times: my committee, my eyes, my wife (twice), my mind. Each time ownership is undermined. The most unsettling couplet is the third. "My eyes never / let me believe // my wife is / not my wife" can be read as a double negative that tangles itself up. His eyes insist on recognising her, yet the thought that she might *not* be his wife has entered his head at all. The stanza break after "believe" leaves the line hanging on doubt before the sentence resolves. The poem gives no explanation, and the gap is what unsettles. Perhaps the office has made him see his home life at a distance, or perhaps routine has made everything familiar look false. Either way, the one relationship that should be most certain is shaky.
The mind fares no better: "my mind is another / day's notes." The phrase echoes office minutes and memos, and "another day's" hints at repetition, as if his thoughts were leftovers from yesterday or a draft for tomorrow, never quite today's. He is not thinking so much as keeping records.
Then the "I" finally arrives, and it does something small and damning: "I am making / an answer do for a lie." The phrase plays on the everyday idiom "make do," which means settling for something inadequate. Here what is inadequate is the truth. He offers an answer, a response that sounds professional, in place of a lie, or perhaps in place of the honest statement that the lie was avoiding. The line is deliberately ambiguous, and its ambiguity is the point. In a world of committees and notes, an answer and a lie are hard to tell apart, and he is the one doing the swapping.
The sound of the poem supports this. The long "i" runs through it: *my*, *eyes*, *wife*, *wife*, *mind*, *I*, *lie*. The vowel of "I" seems to haunt everything the speaker claims, and the poem ends on "lie," which nearly rhymes with "wife" two couplets earlier. That near-echo quietly links the marriage with the falsehood without saying so.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains. It does not lecture about modern work or describe the office in detail. It lets the grammar wobble and the possessives wear thin, and leaves the reader to feel the unease. A student could read it in ten seconds and still be turning over "not my wife" an hour later. In a few short lines it suggests that the real cost of a job may not be tiredness but the slow replacement of honest speech with whatever will do.