"Woke up this morning" is a stock opening line of the blues, and it usually promises trouble. Dave Bonta borrows it and attaches it to ten haiku, so the same refrain begins every stanza and each one then goes somewhere different. The poem is about waking as more than getting out of bed. It is the daily shock of finding out what the world, your body, and your own head have done overnight. Taken together, the small disturbances build toward a quiet recognition of time passing.
The refrain does the job that rhyme would normally do. There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem, but the repeated first line gives the ear something to lean on, and the haiku shape gives it something to be surprised by. The opening lines are always five syllables. The rest hover around the haiku's familiar count without obeying it strictly: "to a thump on the window" fits it, while "with a fierce new itching" runs a little short. The effect is conversational, close to a muttered aside. Because the third lines are so short, they land like the closing beat of a blues verse, often with a twist: "false sky. A dead bird." "I was the monster." "the power's out."
Bonta's images are bodily and slightly absurd. Itching on the soles of the feet, a shoulder ache that has "settled in my spine," and an empty stomach murmuring "sweet nothings" all treat the body as a noisy roommate. The last of these puns on "nothings" so that a romantic phrase becomes a literal hunger. The comedy is real, but it sits beside darker moments. The first stanza is the starkest: the bird has hit the window because the glass reflected a "false sky," and the poem opens on a small death caused by an illusion. Illusion returns later when "the moonlight tricked me" into waking hours early. In both cases the world looks like something it isn't, and someone pays for believing it.
The poem keeps turning these confusions inward. "From someone else's nightmare — / I was the monster" is the most unsettling stanza, because the sleeper wakes into relief and guilt at once. The clock with its "blank face" is a smaller version of the same unease, since the power cut has removed the one thing that tells us where we are in time. Bonta also likes contradictions of season. A winter wren, a bird whose song the poem calls "shapeless" and "summer," sings out of its own name. Seasons are slipping out of order, and the poem is quietly preparing for the real change coming at the end.
That change arrives in the last three stanzas. "Patches of frost in the yard" is followed by a startling non sequitur: "I got your letter." The poem doesn't say what the letter contains. Judging by the cold image beside it, the news may be chilly, but the line also reads as simple, abrupt fact, the kind of thing that happens between one yard and the next. The final stanza, "with the reds & the yellows. / Another autumn," is the only one that wakes up "with" something beautiful. The word "Another" turns that beauty into a count. Autumn's colors are lovely, but they are also one more season used up. The ampersand and the casual tone keep it from sounding grand.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from a small, repeated frame. Haiku usually tie a moment to a season, and the blues turns private misery into something shared and almost cheerful. Putting the two forms together, Bonta lets a single phrase carry fear, humor, ache, and mortality without raising its voice. Each stanza is a slight variation, and the variations add up to the sense of a life lived one morning at a time. By the end, the refrain has stopped sounding like a complaint and has started to sound like a way of paying attention.