Between "us" and "use" there is a single letter, and Dave Bonta builds a six-line poem on that narrow gap. The title, «Us(e)», puts the *e* in brackets, as if it were an afterthought or a half-hidden addition. The poem then asks what happens when people slide from being "us" into being used.
The first two lines sound like a riddle: "the difference between us / is a table." A table is a surprising answer because it is so ordinary and domestic. People sit around one, but they also sit across one, so it can be a meeting place or a barrier. The poem never says which. "Difference" also has an arithmetical sense, and a table can be a grid of figures, so a quiet vocabulary of numbers starts to form. The word "count" in line five then confirms it.
The middle lines turn to work. "Every man minding / a nothing of several uses" is a knotty phrase. "Every man" has the ring of a proverb, with its old, universal, slightly masculine sweep. "Minding" can mean attending to or taking care of, the way a shepherd minds sheep, and that prepares for the ewes to come. It also faintly echoes "never mind," the idea of something not worth minding. Then comes the paradox: "a nothing of several uses." The grammar is loose enough that the phrase might point back to the table, a flat surface with no purpose of its own that serves for dining, writing and bargaining. It might equally describe the work itself, or the people doing it. Either way, something empty is made busy.
The fifth line is where sound takes over: "employed to count ewes and esses." "Ewes" is pronounced exactly like the verb "use," and "esses" are the plural of the letter *s*. Read aloud, the line can sound like "use and S's," and the plural *s* is exactly what turns "use" into "uses," the word that ended the line before. "Employed" is itself a near-synonym for "used," so the vocabulary of labour keeps circling the title. The two things counted are also pointedly pointless. Counting sheep is what people do to fall asleep, and counting letters is clerical busywork. Judging by the images, the poem suggests that people end up occupied with tasks that produce nothing, simply because there is a job to do.
The form supports this. The poem is one unpunctuated sentence in lowercase, six short lines of between three and eight syllables. There is no rhyme. Instead, the poem works through repeated sounds: "us," "uses" and "esses" share their sibilants, and "ewes" echoes "uses" in its vowel. The phrases "ewes and esses" and "night and day" use the same "and" pairing, so the ending has the rhythm of a tally. The short line "is a table" sits flat on the page, like a tabletop, while the long line "a nothing of several uses" stretches out and then drops into the clipped three syllables of the finish.
"Night and day" is the cleverest ending available. As a phrase it means constantly, and the counting never stops. As an idiom it also means total opposites, which brings the poem back to its first word, "difference." It could suggest that ewes are counted at night and esses by day, though that is an inference, not something the poem states. The lack of a full stop means the poem does not close, which fits a task that never finishes.
What makes the poem worth attention is how much it does with so little. The title shows that a tiny letter changes "us" into "use," and the poem asks whether something equally small, a table or a job, can separate people or turn them into tools. It does not lecture. It sets out a puzzle and makes the reader solve it by listening as well as reading, and the answers it offers are playful and unsettling at once.