Five short lines, and a whole domestic comedy plays out inside them. A speaker, away from home, hears his belongings calling and goes back to them. By the end he is talking in the language of a wedding. Dave Bonta's "Materialist" is funny first, and only afterwards does the joke start to look a little uncomfortable.
The title does the first piece of work. A materialist can be someone who loves possessions, the shopper or the hoarder. It can also be someone who believes that nothing exists except matter. The poem never chooses between the two meanings. The speaker is a materialist in the everyday sense because he rushes home to his things. The closing "we" hints at the larger sense, in which he and his stuff may not be so different in kind.
Look at the word "stuff". Bonta could have written "possessions" or "belongings", which sound tidy and owned. "Stuff" is scruffy, the word we use for the clutter we can't be bothered to name. Yet the poem gives it real pathos: "My stuff all alone." "Alone" is the vocabulary of the abandoned, a pet or child left behind in an empty house. The poem never says the speaker is lonely. It hands the loneliness to the objects, and I think that is a way of admitting his own need without saying so. The objects also "call," like a parent at the door, a lover, or something more dangerous. The usual order is reversed, with the owned commanding the owner.
The syntax backs this up. The first sentence runs across three lines and holds back its main clause until the end: "My stuff all alone / and calling me, / I went home." We hear the summons before we hear the response, so the speaker's obedience arrives almost as a reflex. "I went home" is flat and plain, with no hesitation or explanation.
The lines are also shaped with care. There is no rhyme, but the syllable counts run five, four, three, then jump to six and settle back to four. The first three lines shrink as if the speaker were narrowing toward his destination, and "home" lands as the smallest line. Then the poem opens out for its longest line, "We love one another," where the declaration needs room. The sounds do quiet work too. "Alone" and "home" share a long vowel, tying the stuff's condition to the place that cures it. Even more neatly, "alone" has the word "one" inside it, and two lines later "one another" arrives. Solitude turns into mutuality almost in the spelling.
Tense and pronouns shift at the same moment. The story is told in the past ("I went"), but the last two sentences move to the present, as if narrative has hardened into a permanent condition. Meanwhile "my," "me" and "I" give way to "we." Ownership dissolves into partnership, and the speaker no longer has things, he is with them. The final lines, "We love one another. / We cannot part," are short and balanced, and they open with the same word. They sound like vows, and "part" echoes the old promise of staying together until death. But a vow usually says "will not," and this speaker says "cannot." That small word tilts the poem. Love and addiction speak in remarkably similar voices, and the poem leaves us unsure which one we are hearing.
That uncertainty is what makes it worth reading. In about twenty words, Bonta offers neither a sermon against consumerism nor a celebration of it. He gives us a deadpan confession, tender and absurd at once, and lets us decide whether being unable to leave our things is a kind of love or a kind of trap. The deadpan tone also makes the confession hard to dismiss. A reader who laughs at the speaker may notice, a second later, that the laugh is also about their own cluttered shelves and the pull of their own front door.