Few poems open with a meal as strange as this one. Dave Bonta's «Economy» begins with a speaker who is "in the red" and who eats "as little as I can / of old candle." The line sounds like a joke until you notice how deadpan it is. Money is short, food has shrunk to wax, and the speaker mentions almost in passing that "they come to double / the price of things." Then the second stanza turns somewhere unexpected: "I am troubled / with a secret dispute: / who I will marry / and in which ink." Debt, hunger and marriage seem to belong to different poems. The central idea is that they are one problem seen from different sides: how to live, and on what terms, when everything carries a price.
The candle is the most inventive image. On the surface it is a ration, the last and cheapest thing in the cupboard, and the word "old" suggests a stub already half spent. But a candle is also the traditional light for night work, for reading and writing. The speaker is swallowing the light they would work by. The poem never says the speaker is a writer, but the word "ink" in the final line strongly suggests it. Notice too the phrase "as little as I can." It makes the eating of candle sound like a routine budget, not a catastrophe, and that calm tone is where the dark comedy comes from.
The poem is held together by a pun on money and writing. It begins "In the red" and ends on "ink," and in bookkeeping red ink marks a loss. So "in which ink" can be read as a question about whether the marriage will be written in red or black, a debt or a gain. It also recalls that marriages are signed in ink, as contracts. The sudden shift from prices to marriage is therefore less of a leap than it seems. Marriage is another entry in the ledger. The word "dispute" does the same work: it belongs to contested bills and legal letters, and here it is turned inward as a "secret" argument with oneself. Since ink is in play, "who I will marry" may even mean something other than a person, such as a vocation or a way of writing. The poem leaves this open, and the ambiguity is where its life is.
The form is as spare as the diet. There are two unrhymed quatrains, no regular meter, and almost no punctuation beyond a colon and two full stops. The rhythm is that of someone muttering a thought aloud. Enjambment manages the timing. "Of old candle" sits alone on its line, so the odd object arrives only after the sentence has seemed ordinary. "Double" ends a line, and we wait a beat for what is being doubled. "See how" turns to an imagined listener with a shrug, while "they" is never identified, which suggests faceless forces beyond the speaker's control.
There is also a faint sound-rhyme across the stanza break. "Double" at the end of line three is echoed by "troubled" at the end of line five, as if the rising prices and the inner trouble were the same thing. The final line is four monosyllables, "and in which ink," ending on a hard, closing "k" like a stamp on a page. The poem begins with "in the red" and ends with "in which ink," so it closes where it started: still counting, still undecided.
The title brings these threads together. "Economy" comes from the Greek word for managing a household, and it also means saving and doing more with less. The poem practises both. It uses under forty words to hold hunger, inflation, a private quarrel and a possible marriage. What makes it worth reading is how it shows money pressure seeping into the most personal decisions, where it changes the question from "whom do I love?" to "on what terms, and written in what colour?" It does this with humour and without self-pity. The speaker never complains about eating candle. The unease is saved for the last two lines, where no price is mentioned at all.