Five short lines, one sentence, one question: Dave Bonta's "Cut Up" asks where the speaker will go and never answers. The grammar is hypothetical ("Where will I go / when we call one another mad"), so the quarrel is something dreaded, or caught mid-eruption, rather than something finished. The poem's central idea seems to be that when a relationship breaks down, it destroys more than feelings. It wrecks the symbols of union and the speaker's own sense of self, until there is nowhere left to stand.
The hinge of the poem is the word "mad," which appears twice and changes meaning. The first time, in "call one another mad," it is an accusation, meaning insane or furious. "One another" makes it mutual, so there is no innocent party. The second time, in "fooling like mad," it means frantic, out of control. Madness moves from something said to something done, and the insult turns into action within a single line break.
The action is destructive, and the imagery is carefully chosen. "Bride's and bridegroom's ribbons" is wedding vocabulary, bright and ceremonial. The two possessives split the couple into separate roles, each with their own ribbons, as if the union were already coming apart in the grammar. Ribbons are also things that tie, so "pulling off" them suggests untying a knot, and a wedding becomes debris. The poem never says these are the speaker's own wedding ribbons. That is an inference, though the surrounding "we" and "I" invite it.
The third image is odder: "fooling like mad five o'clock scissors / with my papers." The syntax is slippery. Who is fooling with whom? The scissors seem to act on their own, with no hand attached, so nobody takes responsibility for the cutting. "Five o'clock" is a strikingly ordinary detail, the hour when the working day ends and people arrive home, and it sets the violence inside a domestic routine. The hands of a clock at five also open into a wide V, a little like blades, though the poem leaves that connection for the reader to make. "My papers" is deliberately open. It could mean writing, documents, records, or the paperwork of a marriage, and each reading makes the loss more personal. The word "my" is the only possessive that belongs to the speaker, and it is attached to what is being cut.
The title adds more. "Cut up" can mean sliced into pieces, as the ribbons and papers are. It is also slang for clowning around, which fits the strange playfulness of "fooling." And it describes someone emotionally wounded, as in being cut up about something. A poem this small carries three meanings in two words.
The form enacts the same disorder. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, but the lines swell and shrink. They run roughly four, seven, nine, nine and four syllables, so a short opening and closing frame the longer middle, like a held breath that is then dropped. The frame matters because the first line gives us "I" and the last gives us "my papers": the speaker is bracketed by the question and by what is being destroyed, while the quarrel fills the middle. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. The b and p sounds of "bride's," "bridegroom's," "ribbons," "pulling" and "papers" pop and tear, while the hissing s in "ribbons," "scissors" and "papers" is close to the sound of blades. The two participles, "pulling" and "fooling," also dangle without clear subjects. The sentence is cut up too, and its grammar loses control as the quarrelers lose theirs.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. It gives no names, no cause for the argument, and no resolution. The reader gets only the wedding ribbons, the scissors and the unanswered question, and has to supply the story. The poem also treats a household row with real seriousness. "Five o'clock" and "papers" are everyday words, yet the poem shows how quickly such objects can become instruments of grief. By ending on "papers" and a question mark, it leaves the speaker, and the reader, without an exit.