Morning usually arrives as a plain fact: light at the window, the alarm, the world starting up again. In Dave Bonta's "Parallel," it arrives more like an appointment between two versions of the same day. The poem has six short lines, no punctuation and no capital letters, yet it splits one morning in two and sets both halves to work together, badly.
The first three lines are "morning comes / to my parallel day / the same as I do." The grammar is deceptively loose. "Comes" does double duty: it is what morning does, and the closing "do" quietly stands in for it, so the line means "the same as I come." The verb is flexible enough that "arrives" and "wakes up" both seem to fit, and the poem lets them overlap. Morning and the speaker turn up in the same way, as if they were two guests reaching the same door at once. The missing capitals and commas reinforce this. Nothing marks where one thing ends and the other begins.
The title word is the real puzzle. Parallel lines run side by side and never meet, so "my parallel day" suggests a second day shadowing the first. The poem doesn't say what that day runs parallel to. Judging by the text, it could be the day as I plan it against the day as it happens, or the outer day against the inner one. The phrase "my parallel day" is possessive but points to something unnamed, so the poem's missing partner is built into its title.
The second tercet drops the verb altogether: "its instrument / with my instrument / like a mad committee." These lines are a fragment, and the sentence never finishes, which suits the idea of things sounding at once without anyone in charge. The poem's form also mimics its title. "its instrument" and "with my instrument" run alongside each other, repeating the same noun with only the possessive and the preposition changed. Two lines travel in parallel, and the word that joins them, "with," is the closest they get to touching.
The word "instrument" is never pinned down. It could be a musical instrument, a tool, or the body and voice a person plays the day on. Because it stays open, the reader is pulled toward music, and the simile that follows deflates that expectation. After the idea of instruments playing together, we expect an orchestra or a duet. We get a committee. The comparison is funny because a committee is the least musical group imaginable: people talking over one another and agreeing on nothing. "Mad" works two ways, as angry and as crazy, and both fit the clatter of a morning in which every part of a person starts up at once.
The sound of the poem adds to this. The letter m recurs throughout: "morning," "my," "same," "instrument," "mad," and the doubled m of "committee." The effect is a low hum, like a drone under the sense. The lines are short, running from three to six syllables, and the last line of each stanza is the longest in its group: "the same as I do" and "like a mad committee." Each stanza therefore gathers length as it goes. The final word, "committee," ends on a light syllable that tapers off, like a shrug. Nothing rhymes, and that is apt. In a poem about two things failing to harmonise, a tidy chime would be a small lie.
The poem is significant because it compresses a familiar experience into almost nothing. Most of us feel at some point that we are not one self moving neatly through the day but several impulses, duties and moods, each with its own instrument, all starting at once. Calling that a "mad committee" gives it comedy without dismissing it. The poem also leaves real gaps: whose instrument, parallel to what, and what exactly comes. The reader has to fill them, and so becomes another member of the committee, deciding what the poem means while the other voices talk.