A hat is a small thing to build a poem around, but it sets the poem's strange logic going. Wonder is normally something that happens to us, yet Dave Bonta's speaker *wears* it, "like a broad-brimmed hat." A broad brim shades the face, so even awe becomes partly a disguise, something to stand behind. That fits the title, "Self-censor," which can be read as a command or as a label for a person. The speaker is both the one who cuts and the one who is cut.
The poem is built from six unrhymed couplets, all lowercase and with no punctuation at all. Each couplet makes one small, complete move, and the reader supplies the pauses. The lines are short and conversational, and they vary in length enough to avoid any drumbeat. Look at the pronoun, though. Every couplet contains an "i" (wear, try, cut, stop, could, would), and it is always the small letter. The speaker keeps trying to shrink, but the poem keeps returning to the self it wants to reduce.
The imagery moves from concealment to something close to panic. "When the moon is dead empty" suggests a moonless night, the one time a shadow can really disappear, and "dead empty" has a blunt, everyday ring that keeps the line from sounding precious. To lose your shadow is to lose the dark, accompanying double that proves you were there. The next couplet is the hinge of the poem: "i cut what i thought were tethers / they turn out to be roots." Tethers hold you back, while roots hold you too but also feed you. The only admission of error in the poem is tucked into "what i thought were," and the discovery changes the stakes. Cutting yourself loose may mean cutting off your nourishment.
After that, the poem's pictures grow gentler but sadder. "When i stop writing on paper / the trees become less hostile" is oddly funny, and it has a logic. Paper comes from trees, so every page carries a faint debt to the forest. "Hostile" is a startling word for trees, and the poem suggests the hostility may be partly the speaker's own guilt, projected onto the landscape. Then comes "i could swallow what's left of my fire / and tend bees." The phrase "what's left" tells us the fire is already dwindling. "Swallow" turns creative energy inward like a small violence against the self. Yet the alternative it imagines is humble and useful: beekeeping, work done quietly for the sake of something sweet. As it happens, beekeepers do use smoke to calm a hive, so fire is not entirely abandoned even in this retreat.
The last couplet changes mood in a way that is easy to miss. The earlier lines mostly report what the speaker does or has done ("i wear," "i cut," "i stop"). The ending moves into the conditional: "i could," "i would." The wish to vanish stays hypothetical, a fantasy the speaker keeps testing without committing to it. And the final line carries a paradox: "i would write myself out of history / line by painstaking line." The only tool for erasing oneself is the tool the speaker has just been trying to put down. The repeated word "line" makes the sentence feel like a stitched seam, and "painstaking" holds both *pain* and *care*, which sums up the poem's mixed feelings. The speaker wants to vanish, but with meticulous craftsmanship.
That contradiction is what makes the poem worth reading closely. It never resolves whether the speaker should keep writing or give it up, and the poem itself is evidence on one side of the argument. A poem about disappearing has, by existing, declined to disappear. The poem also takes a familiar worry, the pull between wanting to be heard and wanting to be left alone, and compresses it into about sixty words. It does this without argument or self-pity. Its tone is dry, a little humorous and quietly honest, and the images of hat, shadow, roots, trees and bees do the emotional work. What lingers is the reversal at its center. The things we try to cut away may turn out to be the things that keep us alive.