Six lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and a title that winks before the poem has begun. In Dave Bonta's "Quick lay for John Donne", the word "lay" does double duty. In older English a lay is a short song or poem, which fits a poem offered as a tribute. In modern slang it means something much cheekier, and "quick" sharpens the joke. It also carries its old sense of "alive", as in "the quick and the dead", so the title sets life against the "die" of the first line before we reach it. Donne, a poet of the early seventeenth century, is famous for mixing desire, death and argument in a single witty breath, and "die" could be a pun for sexual climax in his day. A poem addressed to him is entitled to a bit of mischief.
The idea is a chain of dependence. A mouth "can die / for want of mirth", and skin, in turn, can die "for want / of a mouth to read it". The second death is never stated. The verb "can die" is silently borrowed from the opening, so the poem trusts the reader to carry it across. By the third couplet the two needs meet: "coming together in / a merry lay". Mouth, skin and pleasure each complete the others.
The word "want" does the most work. In the idiom "for want of" it simply means "lack", but it also means desire, and the poem lets both senses glow at once. The line break after "want" in "and the skin for want" leaves the word hanging for a beat before "of a mouth" arrives, so the lineation itself seems to wait and ache. The hunger is real, too. The stakes are "die", yet what is missing is only mirth, which suggests that joy is a necessity here, not a luxury.
The most striking image is the skin that a mouth must "read". Skin as a page is an old comparison, and parchment is, after all, made from skin. But Bonta gives the reader a mouth instead of eyes. A mouth reads by kissing and tasting, and it also reads aloud, so reading becomes a spoken, physical act and not a silent, private one. It is also the only noun the poem repeats. It opens line 1 and returns in line 4, the hinge between mirth above and skin below. The mouth is where speech, appetite and laughter live, and the poem needs all three.
Sound supports this. There is no end rhyme (mirth, it, lay never chime), but the poem hums inside. "Mouth", "mirth", "mouth" and "merry" keep returning to the closed-lip "m", the sound of contented humming, so that "mirth" and "merry" almost rhyme across the page. The rhythm also loosens as it goes. The opening couplet is nearly regular, two beats a line: "a MOUTH can DIE / for WANT of MIRTH". Then "of a mouth to read it" spreads out, and "coming together in" tumbles forward on its unstressed syllables. It even stops on the little preposition "in", which leans over the line break into "a merry lay". The poem's final stress lands on "lay", the pun word, with a light click. Three tidy couplets also suggest pairs, which suits a poem about things coming together.
Its significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. Bonta does not imitate Donne's elaborate, argumentative conceits. He compresses them into a miniature, a single sentence that behaves like a quick epigram. Yet the claim is large: language is a bodily need, poems are meant to be tasted and spoken, and pleasure is part of staying alive. Judging by the title, the poem is also a gift to an earlier poet, a joke he might have enjoyed, passed across four centuries. For students, it shows that a poem can be light in tone and still serious in what it argues, and that one well-placed pun can carry the whole weight.