Eleven words are enough to turn a home office into a scene of mild romantic sabotage. Dave Bonta's "Distracted" starts with the flattest of situations, "office at home," and within two lines the speaker has been pulled somewhere he clearly didn't plan to go.
The first line reads like a label rather than a sentence. It has no verb, no capital letter and no punctuation, just the sort of phrase you might find in a job listing or on a form. It sets up a world of schedules and screens, where the spare room has been drafted into service as a workplace. Then comes the sudden turn: "her lips dine with me." The grammar is worth noticing. The subject isn't "she" but "her lips," a part standing in for the whole. The woman shrinks to a single feature, and that feature is given a thoroughly social act. The poem never says whether she is in the room, kissing him over a sandwich, or whether he is simply picturing her. That gap is the poem's engine, and readers have to fill it themselves.
"Dine" is the key word. A person might "eat lunch" at a desk, but dining implies a table, a pause, an appetite, even a little ceremony. Set beside "office," it sounds almost comically formal. It also carries a faint hunger, so the lips become both companion and temptation. The word turns a working lunch into something closer to a date.
The last line, "on site," then snaps the poem back into workplace language, and it is deliberately slippery. In office jargon, "on site" means physically present, as opposed to remote. It also sounds exactly like "on sight," which brings in the idea of seeing. And in an age of screens, "site" might point to a website, so the lips could be arriving as an image or a video call. The poem doesn't choose between these readings. Each one changes what the lips are: a real kiss, a glimpse, a picture. The title makes all three plausible, since a distraction might be a person walking in or an open browser tab.
The sound of the poem is quietly organised even though nothing rhymes. "Dine" and "site" share a long *i*, so the final line echoes the middle one, as if the work phrase has been infected by the pleasure that came before it. "Office," "home" and "on" keep returning to a rounded *o*, which gives the opening line a cosy, enclosed feel. The syllable count runs four, five, then two. The poem has the compression of a haiku but not its 5-7-5 balance. Instead it shrinks, and the two-syllable ending lands like a punchline, or like someone hastily closing a laptop.
The missing punctuation matters too. Because nothing marks where to pause, the reader decides how the lines fall. They can be read as three separate fragments, or as one run-on thought: office at home, her lips dine with me on site. "On site" can feel like an afterthought, the speaker trying to drag the moment back into professional vocabulary and failing. The shape of the poem acts out the distraction its title names. It begins as a statement about work, gets hijacked in the middle, and limps back with a phrase that no longer means what it did.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It captures a familiar tension, the way home and work now overlap and intimacy slips into hours meant for something else, without lecturing about it. The humour comes from a clash of registers: the dry, administrative "office" and "on site" on either side, and between them something warm and unbusinesslike. A reader can see, in miniature, how word choice, line breaks and deliberate ambiguity can do the work of a whole paragraph. The poem is also honest about distraction. It doesn't pretend the speaker minds very much.