The title promises a verdict, but Dave Bonta's poem never lists a single fault. In five short lines the speaker stacks up metaphors, each one a different way of saying "I am not what I could have been." The central idea is that self-judgement can be an accusation and a self-portrait at once, and that the self it condemns survives only as writing, since the last thing it does is go "into ink."
The opening line, "I am a society," is odd in an interesting way. "Society" is a large, civic, almost bureaucratic word, and placing it after "I am" makes the self plural, a crowd of competing parts rather than one person. The next image, "worn instruments," doesn't say what kind of instruments. They could be musical, surgical or navigational, and the poem leaves the choice open. "Worn" is the key word. These instruments are not broken, only used up, so the self-criticism is about fatigue as much as failure. They once worked, and perhaps still half-work.
Then comes the bluntest phrase, "a should-have-been." Bonta squeezes a whole sentence of regret into one hyphenated noun. It plays on the familiar insult "has-been," but it turns the failure from something that happened into something that never did. A has-been at least had a past. A should-have-been is defined entirely by absence. Notice also how the repeated "a" ("a should-have-been, / a rogue fleet") makes the speaker sound like someone trying on labels in a mirror, discarding each one.
The last image pulls the poem together. "Fleet" echoes "society" as another collective noun, and ships carry instruments, so the fleet quietly gathers up the first line's imagery. "Rogue" is a double-edged word. It means a ship out of command, but it also carries some swagger, because a rogue is free as well as lost. Then the fleet has "gone into ink." The phrase can be read several ways. Ink is dark water, so the fleet has sailed into a sea of it. Ink is also writing, which suggests the speaker is a writer whose scattered energies ended up on the page. And ink recalls the dark cloud some sea creatures release to escape, so the disappearance could be a getaway. The poem doesn't choose between these readings.
The form is as spare as the language. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines taper steadily: roughly seven syllables, then five, four, four and three. The poem narrows like a fleet shrinking toward the horizon, and the short final line, "into ink," shuts like a door. The sound also does some quiet work. "Instruments," "into" and "ink" all begin with the same "in-" sound, so the first image and the last are linked. Tools become writing across five lines. The whole poem is a single sentence with no internal punctuation, so the metaphors run on without pause. The only verbs are "am" and "gone," so the speaker is defined by a state of being and then by having departed. Nothing is actively done, which suits a mood of stalled regret.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it handles harsh self-assessment. It never grovels or explains. It lets images accumulate, and each one is both a criticism and strangely dignified. A worn instrument has been played, and a rogue fleet at least set out. There is also a paradox at the end. If the fleet has gone into ink, then ink on the page is where it now exists, and the poem itself is the proof. The act of criticising the self produces the very thing the poem seems to lament. Few words do a lot of work here, and for a student that is the lesson. A poem can say something complicated about failure by trusting a handful of well-chosen images.