Six lines, one sentence, and by the end the ground has tilted. Dave Bonta's "High" opens on a word that won't settle. Followed by a comma, "High" hangs alone like a mood: the speaker might be intoxicated, elated, or simply elevated. The lines that follow pull in other senses. Courts have high benches, and "the Most High" is a traditional name for God. The poem never chooses between these meanings. Its first word is a kind of pun that keeps all of them in play.
What follows is a string of actions with one subject: "I desire... answer... take." Each verb leads somewhere stranger. To "desire / the writ of the Lord" is odd, because a writ is a formal written command, usually something people dread receiving. Wanting one suggests a longing to be summoned or ordered about by a higher power. Yet the next move is irreverent. Asked a question by a judge, the speaker answers "with three pints of wine." Words are replaced by drink, and the measure is a pub's, not a church's. The grandest vocabulary in the poem ("writ," "Lord," "judge") sits right beside the most ordinary. Wine also carries a double meaning here. It can be the stuff of a drinking session or of a sacrament, and the poem doesn't say which. That fits the opening word, which can also mean drunk or lifted up.
The central idea seems to be a collision between authority and appetite. Law and divinity want order, answers and obedience, while the speaker responds with thirst and muddle. The poem doesn't moralise about this. It shows the collision, and the result is both funny and faintly unnerving.
The last two lines make the unease sharper. "Take by mistake for supper / a hand with strawberry on it" is where the logic of the poem slips fully into dream. The syntax enacts the mistake. We read "take by mistake for supper" and wait for something edible, and only in the final line does the object arrive, a hand. The phrase "with strawberry on it" is clipped, with no article, as if strawberry were jam on toast. The poem doesn't say whose hand it is or what the strawberry is: a topping, a stain, a mark. Because the hand comes right after the Lord and the judge, a reader might wonder whether it belongs to either of them. That is only a possibility the arrangement invites, not something the poem states. Either way, eating (or nearly eating) a hand gives the ending a quiet, comic menace, and it echoes the earlier hint of communion, where bread and wine stand for a body.
The sound and shape of the poem support this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but there is pattern. Counting syllables, the first four lines run four, five, four, five, short and clipped like terse statements. Then the fifth and sixth lines stretch to eight syllables each, as if the speaker's grip on the situation loosens just as the mistake happens. Long "i" sounds also thread through the opening: "High," "I," "desire," then later "wine" and "by." They give the poem a slow, slightly slurred drone, appropriate to a speaker who may be drunk. The near-echo of "take" inside "mistake" is another small trap. The word is repeated almost without our noticing, and the mistake is built into the verb itself.
The poem's imagery works through sharp contrast rather than description. We never learn where the speaker is, who the judge is, or why a writ is wanted. That absence is part of its effect. The poem offers the bare outline of a scene, with the logic of a dream or a fragment of a parable, and leaves readers to supply the rest.
This is what makes the poem worth studying. In under thirty words it holds reverence and irreverence, the legal and the bodily, comedy and a flicker of horror, all in one unpunctuated sweep. It shows how word choice, ambiguity and the placement of a single noun at the end of a sentence can do the work of a whole story. It also shows that a poem doesn't have to explain itself to stay in the mind.