Eight unrhymed lines hold a whole ruined bargain in Dave Bonta's "Lucre." The speaker has struck a deal, collected the winnings, and lets us see only gradually that the winnings are death. The central idea is the corrosive arithmetic of greed. A person can "profit" in a way that costs everything, and the cleverest cheat in the room may be the one cheating himself.
Start with the title. "Lucre" is a word hardly anyone uses on its own now. It survives mostly in the phrase "filthy lucre," money gained shabbily or dishonestly. By choosing the bare word, the poem delivers its moral verdict before the first line, and money is never neutral here.
The opening is abrupt: "White-hot and a black burn: / mind and face." There is no verb and no "I," so we arrive in the middle of a sensation. The colon works like a caption, naming the two colours first and then saying where they belong. The mind is white-hot, like fever, fury, or a thought too bright to look at. The face is a black burn, the scorched aftermath, which could be shame made visible. The sounds do the work too. "Black burn" jams two stressed syllables together, and the repeated *b* hits like a slap. Heat and its residue, glare and char, give us a before and after in just five words.
Then comes a small, sly turn: "I look for direction, / see money and a petticoat." The line break lets the first line hang like a prayer. The answer arrives in the next line, and it is not a signpost but two objects, listed flatly and without comment. The petticoat, a slightly antique word, stands in for a woman or for desire, so the compass points to money and sex. The old-fashioned diction gives the poem the air of a parable rather than a diary entry. The speaker doesn't say he chose wrongly. He only reports what he saw, and the missing explanation is part of the indictment.
The second stanza moves from sensation to consequence. "I have taken up with that dog" is colloquial, the phrase we might use for someone who falls in with a bad crowd or a disreputable lover. The repeated "that" ("that dog, / that plenipotentiary death") makes the speaker sound like he's pointing at someone we both know. Then the poem's longest word lands: *plenipotentiary*, a person given full power to act on behalf of a government. Among all these short, blunt words it sounds almost comically grand. The clash is the point. The dog is low, a creature that trails after you, and the plenipotentiary is official and authoritative. Death becomes both squalid and bureaucratic, a companion who also holds the contract. In a poem about deals, it makes sense that death arrives as an envoy empowered to negotiate.
The ending turns to the vocabulary of the ledger: "What a great profit I made. / How I cheated." There are no exclamation marks, though the phrasing is exclamatory, and that deadpan quality is where the irony lives. The lines can be read as a scoundrel's swagger or as a bitter recognition that the person cheated was himself. The poem won't choose, and it is stronger for refusing. The shift into the past tense also matters. The earlier lines stay in the present ("I look," "see"), then "I have taken up" links past to present, and "made" and "cheated" close the account like entries struck off. The sentences shrink as they go, from seven words to three, so the poem seems to run out of breath.
Its significance lies in this compression. The poem does what its subject does: it trades a great deal for very little. We never learn what was bought, whom the speaker cheated, or what the bargain was. The unrhymed, uneven lines break at points of pressure, and the reader is left to supply the story. That makes us partners in the transaction, and it explains why a few plain words, a burn, a petticoat, a dog, can leave such a cold feeling of consequence behind.