Six short lines, one word repeated until it almost stops sounding like a word: that is the whole machinery of "Paper trouble," and it is enough to build a small, slippery argument about how people deal with what worries them. Read quickly, it is a tongue-twister. Read slowly, it describes someone who copes with trouble by turning it into something written, handled and flat, and who admits that the cure looks suspiciously like the disease.
The poem moves in four steps. First comes an event: "A paper on trouble / troubled us." Writing about trouble has itself caused trouble, so the subject has leaked into the thing that was meant to contain it. Next comes a diagnosis: "our trouble / is a paper trouble." The phrase can be read in several ways, and the poem lets them sit together. It might mean trouble that exists only on paper, as a "paper tiger" is only a pretend threat. It might mean trouble made of paper, of reports and documents and discussion. Then comes the response: "I paper my wits with trouble." Here "paper" turns from noun to verb, and the picture is of someone pasting sheets across their own mind the way you paper a wall, or, in the old idiom, paper over the cracks. Only in the last two lines do we get the motive: "because I would not / have trouble."
The paradox at the centre is that the speaker avoids trouble by covering their wits with it. One reading is that trouble turned into text is trouble tamed, abstract and at arm's length, so it is safer to study it than to meet it. But covering is also dulling. Wits are supposed to be sharp, and these have been wallpapered. The poem never says which reading wins, and the wish for safety and the cost of that safety are made of the same material.
The construction is what makes this feel inevitable. Of the poem's twenty-four words, six are "trouble" or "troubled" and three more are "paper," so more than a third of what we read is one of two words. Five of the six lines also end on "trouble." That is rhyme stripped down to repeating the same word, so instead of chiming it thuds, like a thought you cannot stop returning to. The one line that escapes is the fifth, "because I would not," which is also the line of refusal. The break there is effective: "would not" stands alone for a moment as flat stubbornness before "have trouble" arrives and drags the speaker back to the word they were trying to avoid.
The rhythm supports this. Counting syllables, the lines run six, six, six, eight, five, three. The first three are evenly matched and rock on falling endings, PA-per, TROU-ble, like a mind going back and forth over the same thing. The fourth line stretches out as the confession arrives, and then the poem shrinks to almost nothing. The sounds help too. The soft pops of *p* and *b* in "paper" and "trouble" suggest muttering, or sheets being shuffled, and "wits with" ties itself in a tight little knot.
Small shifts matter as well. "Us" in the second line becomes "I" in the fourth, so a shared problem turns into a private strategy. The colon after "troubled us" promises an explanation, and the poem keeps explaining, adding a diagnosis, a remedy and a reason, as if the speaker were building a case for themselves. Yet it ends where it began, on "trouble," with no exit.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it does with so little. By changing the jobs a word does, "paper" as noun, adjective and verb, "trouble" as noun and as the verb "troubled," it creates a loop of logic that the reader has to climb out of. Judging by the text, the poem is also an example of what it describes. It is itself a short paper on trouble, a neat piece of text in which the trouble is kept. Whether that is protection or evasion is left for the reader to decide, which may be the most honest thing the poem could do.