Five lines, one sentence, and a sea that has been rehired: Dave Bonta's "Poison Pen" packs a strange little workplace comedy into the space of a postcard. The title promises anonymous malice, the kind of nasty letter sent from the shadows. What the poem delivers is odder and funnier. The speaker writes not to a person but to "some other sea," and the complaint is saved for the last line, where the target finally appears: "the admiral, an old hypocrite."
The sea is the poem's most puzzling figure. It is addressed as "who," not "which," so it becomes a someone, a confidant to receive gossip. It "lay long in bed," and the phrase works on two levels. A sea has a bed, the seabed, so the line is a quiet pun. But it also pictures a sulking invalid, or a worker who has been off for a long time. The next lines push that second reading into bureaucratic comedy: "one formerly and now again / to be employed as the sea." Here being the sea is a job, with a past tenure and a reappointment, as if the ocean were a retired official called back for another term. The stiff, official phrasing ("formerly," "employed") rubs against the vastness of the thing it describes, and that friction is where the humor lives.
The word "other" is easy to skip, but it matters. A speaker who writes to "some other sea" sounds casual, like someone mentioning "some other guy." That suggests the speaker is a sea too, or at least belongs to the same trade. The poem never says so, and that is a judgment drawn from the wording, but it would explain the tone. These are colleagues complaining about the boss, and the boss is an admiral, a figure who claims command over the sea while depending on the sea to do the work.
The poem is built to hold back its target. The sentence starts with letters, drifts through the sea's long rest and its rehiring, and only in the last line gets to the person who is the subject. It reads like real gossip: a long wind-up, a few digressions, and then the verdict. The dash after "bed" adds to this, since it opens an aside that wanders off before the sentence recovers.
There is no regular rhyme, but there is an echo. "Sea" ends both the first and fourth lines, a repeated word doing the work of rhyme, and it returns like a tide. This fits the poem's idea of being "formerly and now again" something. The line lengths also move like water. Counting syllables, they run roughly nine, five, eight, seven, and eleven. The shortest line, "who lay long in bed," feels like an ebb, slow and sunken. The final line is the longest and swells to a close. Its comma gives the speaker a half-breath before the insult, and "an old hypocrite" comes in like an afterthought, which makes it sound even more heartfelt.
The sounds help too. The early lines are full of soft, liquid consonants: "letters," "lay long," "formerly." They are the sounds of lolling and water. The last word, "hypocrite," ends on a hard *k* and a sharp *t*, and the poem snaps shut like a lid. Even the title plays in the background. Ink is liquid, and the sea is the biggest inkwell imaginable, so a "poison pen" aimed at a sea could mean poison poured into it. That is an inference, not something the poem states, but the imagery invites it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. We never learn what the admiral did or what his hypocrisy looks like. We get only the grievance, delivered in the offhand tone of someone who assumes the listener already knows. That small gap between mighty images (an admiral, the sea) and petty feelings (spite, gossip, irritation at a boss) deflates authority without a single raised voice. The admiral may command fleets, but in this poem he is just the subject of a letter that is written in bad faith and filed under complaint. The sea, meanwhile, is not a mighty force at all. It is an employee, rehired, and it has opinions.