Silence is usually described as an absence, but Dave Bonta's poem makes it sound like an appetite. "Words love quiet" is a strange, almost paradoxical opening: words are the very things quiet gets rid of, yet here they are, longing for it. One way to read the line is that words, like the speech of a man who says little, would rather stay unsaid. The title, set in quotation marks, points to a stock figure, the "strong, silent type", and the poem then looks at what that figure costs.
The next two lines work by leaving something out. "As the office a clock / or horses the evening" drops the verb "love", so the reader has to supply it. The grammar is itself a little silent. The comparisons are odd and precise. An office loves a clock because a clock is the one thing that makes a steady noise without disturbing anyone, and it measures out the working day. Horses love the evening, when work is done and the air cools. Office, clock, evening: the lines move through a day of duty toward its end. There is also a brief double take at the line break, where "horses" can look like a verb before the sense settles. The poem makes you hesitate, then lets you recover.
The horses planted in line three come back in the second stanza as something to ride. "We ride easily through the streets" shifts from general statements to a scene, and the "we" is never explained. Judging by the text, it could be rider and horse, or speaker and reader, or the speaker and the whole company of silent types. The word "streets" suggests a town rather than open country, so the rider has an audience. "Easily" matters here. It describes how the ride looks: relaxed, composed, unbothered.
The last line undercuts that. "Feet cramped by new hard boots" gives the body's version of events. The rhythm helps. The previous line flows on long vowels and soft sounds ("ride easily through"), but this one jams three heavy stresses together in "new hard boots", and the clipped consonants of "cramped" and "hard" make the line physically tight. A reader reciting it feels the squeeze. The ease is on the surface and the pain is below it, where nobody is looking. The detail that the boots are *new* is telling. They have not been broken in, so the comfort and confidence they promise has not yet been earned. It seems fair to infer that the poem sees the "strong, silent type" as a role, something put on like a costume and still stiff, rather than a natural state.
Formally the poem is as spare as its subject. It has no rhyme, no capital letters, no punctuation, and no full stop at the end. The lowercase, unpunctuated lines have a modest, murmured quality that suits a poem about quiet, and the missing full stop means the poem never announces that it has finished. It simply stops, the way a person might stop in mid-thought rather than admit something hurts. The two-line second stanza is also shorter than the first, so the poem seems to run out of room just as the boots begin to pinch.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it takes a cliché and tests it, without a single word of complaint. It never says that suppressing feeling is painful, or that performing toughness is tiring. It shows a comfortable-looking ride and then a pair of cramped feet, and leaves the reader to put the two together. In that sense the poem is itself a strong, silent type, a few words that hold back their explanation, and it makes the reader feel the discomfort that its speaker will not name. It is also a useful lesson in how much a poem can do with what it leaves out: a missing verb, a missing full stop, a missing confession.