Seven short lines, and by the end the speaker has called himself a fool, a bad poet and a drunk, all without seeming sorry. Dave Bonta's "Mr. P.'s poetry" is a miniature self-portrait that mocks its own subject, and the mockery turns out to be a clever way of defending him.
The title matters. "Mr. P." is a name reduced to an initial, and the poetry is described as his, not "mine." The poem is then spoken in the first person, so the speaker seems to be a mask, a character who introduces himself in the third person and then takes over. That small gap between label and voice is where the irony begins. Nothing in the text tells us who Mr. P. is, and the poem doesn't need that: he is any poet who has looked at his own work and shrugged.
The poem's central movement is a shrinking of the world. It opens wide: "I walk in fields broad and common." The word "common" works twice, suggesting shared land open to everyone and also the ordinary, the commonplace. Then comes the sharpest turn: "journey one inch." A journey is meant to be long, an inch is almost nothing, and the two words cancel each other. The speaker walks yet goes nowhere. Next he is standing "in church till dark," and the verb is telling. He is not praying or kneeling, only standing, and the hours pass without any sign of revelation. From a field to a building to a bottle, his surroundings tighten. "Then wine, two bottles" is a fragment with no verb at all, as if the speaker can't be bothered to build a sentence around it.
The next line gives the poem its comic centre: "a rose and no wit." A rose is the oldest prop in love poetry, and he has one. What he lacks is wit, in the old sense of intelligence as well as the modern sense of cleverness. The joke is that this line is itself witty. The poet claims to have no wit while using a rose, a semicolon and a sudden drop into bathos to show he has plenty.
The sound of the poem supports this quiet trickery. There is no rhyme at the line ends, which suits a speaker who has stopped trying to impress. But the poem is full of small echoes. "Wine" and "wit" share their first sound, and the f-sounds in "fields," "folly," "friends" and "fool" tie the opening to the close. That chain ends in a neat irony: the fields where he wandered and the fool he becomes are linked by sound. The line lengths are uneven too. Counting syllables roughly gives eight, four, five, ten, ten, seven, four. The lines swell to the two long ones about wine and verses, the poem's "indulgent" middle, then contract again. The final line, "I play the fool," is as short as "journey one inch" and almost as flat. Having used up his scale of excuses, he just says it.
That last line deserves attention because "play" does so much. A fool can be a person who has made a mistake, but "playing" the fool means performing, choosing the role. It also suggests a game and a theatre, so the poem quietly admits that this humility is a performance. The tradition of the fool who tells truths others dare not is an old one, and the poem seems aware of it. The earlier lines make that reading more attractive: "Let my pitiful verses get a laugh" is an imperative, almost a request, and it reads like someone giving permission to the audience. Then comes the unexpected comfort of "My folly has friends, I note." The phrase "I note" is dry and observant, the voice of a man making a small discovery. Foolishness, it turns out, is a kind of company. Failure shared with others stops feeling like failure.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In about forty words it creates a character, a day that runs from fields to darkness, a joke at poetry's expense, and a gentle argument that being laughed at can be a way of belonging. It never boasts, and that is its quiet boast: the self-mockery is so well made that the verses are anything but pitiful.