Most spies report to a handler. In Dave Bonta's "Secret agent", the speaker reports to lunch. "I tell my mind / to my sandwich," the poem begins, in the flattest voice imaginable, and from that deadpan opening it slides into a small, strange dispatch from another country. In six lines it asks what becomes of dangerous knowledge when nobody important is listening, and what happens when somebody is.
The first couplet is a joke that doubles as a puzzle. "Tell my mind" echoes the idiom of speaking your mind, but the grammar twists it. The mind itself becomes the thing handed over, like a package, and the recipient is the humblest listener possible. The line break does the comic work: "I tell my mind" sounds portentous, and "to my sandwich" lets the air out. Yet the sandwich suits a spy poem. You could slip a message inside it, and a person eating alone looks harmless, which is exactly what an agent would want. The title invites us to read the whole meal as cover.
The report itself arrives in the second couplet: "how in the country of creeds and good chocolate / the young get vicious." This is the longest line in the poem, eleven or twelve syllables against the four and five around it, so the dispatch swells at the moment it reaches its content. "Country of creeds and good chocolate" pairs rigid belief with sensual pleasure, and it reads like a travel brochure that has been quietly sabotaged. The hard c of "country" and "creeds" gives it a chanting, fable-like ring. Then comes "the young get vicious," as plain as something overheard on a bus. The poem never says the creeds cause the viciousness. It sets the two facts side by side and leaves the inference to us, as an intelligence report might list observations without daring to interpret them.
The last couplet abandons realism. "The king's ear is with child / as water is with ice." The king's ear is the organ through which a ruler receives information, and perhaps a nod to the whisperers who feed it. Here it is pregnant, so something is gestating where news arrives. The simile explains and obscures at once. Water is "with" ice in the sense that it is always potentially on its way to being ice, carrying hardness inside its softness. Read that way, whatever grows in the king's ear will be cold and rigid, born of something fluid. One could take it as a warning that power, simply by listening, turns what it hears into something frozen, a creed perhaps. That is an interpretation, since the poem offers only the image. There is also a sly echo: "water with ice" is how you order a drink, so the final line drifts back to the lunch table where the poem began.
Sound holds the poem together without rhyme. It is free verse in three couplets, with no regular metre and no end rhyme. But the long *i* vowel runs through "mind," "child" and "ice," linking the speaker's mind at the start to the royal pregnancy and the freezing water at the end. The speaker's mind and the king's ear start to look like the same kind of vessel, each carrying something that will come out changed. The repeated "with" in "with child" and "with ice" adds a second, quieter link, and the odd idea of being "with" something gives the closing lines their uncanny logic.
The poem is worth reading for how much it does with so little. It turns political unease into comic surrealism and never explains the joke or the fear. The confidant is absurdly harmless, the listener on the throne is ominously pregnant, and the reader sits between them as the real recipient of a message in code. In a world where everyone is talking and few are heard, the poem suggests, confiding in a sandwich may be the only safe option. The poem itself is the leak.