The billionaire never appears in the poem itself. He lives only in the title, and everything beneath it reads like a description of what he sets in motion, or of what he is made of. Dave Bonta gives us five short lines, about twenty words, with no punctuation and no first person until the very last line. In that space the poem moves from a political system to a human body, and then to a cry.
The four opening lines are built from bare verbs with no subjects: *lock*, *go*, *eat*, *change*. They sound like a recipe, an incantation, or a chain of cause and effect. Nobody is named as responsible, which makes the instructions feel impersonal and inevitable, the way large systems do. The direction of travel matters too. The poem starts with abstraction ("order"), moves to a resource ("tar and oil"), then to the mouth ("eat"), and ends with a transformation of the body itself ("change into lead"). It closes in from the world on the person.
The first line is the cleverest. "Lock into order in order to war" uses "order" twice in two different grammatical jobs. First it is a thing, a rigid arrangement, and "lock into" brings to mind lockstep, locked-in decisions, even a locked cell. Then it becomes half of the stock phrase "in order to," the grammar of justification. Everything we do, the phrase implies, is done *in order to* something, and here that something is "war," a noun forced to act as a verb. The sentence slides from bureaucratic calm to violence in one syllable. The sound helps: *or-der, or-der, war* is one vowel repeated until it turns into the thing it names.
The middle lines are physical. "Go after" is hunting language, and "tar and oil" are black, thick, sticky substances, nothing like the clean abstraction of "order." Then comes "eat money," a deliberately absurd image of appetite that cannot be satisfied, since money is not food. It recalls the old story of King Midas, whose wealth turned to something he couldn't live on, though the poem never mentions him. Next, "change into lead" runs alchemy backwards. The old dream was to turn lead into gold, and here the eater of money ends up as lead. Lead is a rich word in this context. It is the metal of bullets, which connects back to "war," and it is also a poison, which connects to "eat." "Change" may also glance at coins, so that "eat money / change into lead" briefly reads as a pun, though that is my inference rather than something the poem insists on. Notice, too, that the quatrain begins with "lock" and ends with "lead," two *l* words that frame the sequence like a door shutting.
The rhythm tightens as it goes. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines shrink: nine syllables in the first, about six in the second, then three, then four. The poem seems to compress under its own weight, which suits its subject. Because the sound patterns are so close and the line breaks so abrupt, silence does a lot of the work. Then comes a blank line and the poem's only shift of voice.
"O pain of my pain" abandons the cold imperatives for the old lyric gesture of apostrophe, the "O" of someone addressing the unaddressable. The phrase "X of my X" also recalls biblical forms such as "bone of my bones," where a word is doubled to mean the deepest possible version of itself. Pain here is not just felt but sits at the root of pain. The title explains the tone: the blues is a form of lament built on repetition, and this last line repeats its own noun like a refrain. Who is speaking is left open. It could be a witness grieving for the victims of the system just described, or the billionaire himself, or both at once. That ambiguity keeps the poem from becoming a slogan.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much argument it fits into so little. It names no country, no war and no villain, yet it traces the logic of wealth, resource-hunting and violence in a handful of verbs, and it makes the reader feel the cost as weight. Its last line suggests the damage is not only out in the world but inside the speaker too.