Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to turn a dog into a portrait of a restless mind. "Dogged" opens with a flat declaration, "I am a dog," with no "like" or "as if" to soften it. The speaker doesn't compare himself to the animal. He becomes one, and the title backs him up. "Dogged" means stubborn and relentless, and the animal is built right into the word.
What this dog does is odd. He has come "to kill / that tip of the tail again." Everyone knows the comedy of a dog spinning after its own tail, but "kill" darkens the joke, and "again" tells us this is a habit, not a game. The tail-tip is the part of yourself just out of reach, and the chase can't be won because the target is attached to the hunter. Then comes "dig the hole deeper," which works two ways. Digging is what dogs do, and it also recalls the idiom of digging yourself into a hole, making a bad situation worse by sheer effort.
In the second stanza the hole turns out to be in the head. To "trepan" is to bore into the skull, an old surgical practice, and the object of the verb is "my own never mind." The phrase is the poem's cleverest move. "Never mind" is what we tell ourselves about thoughts we would rather dismiss, and Bonta turns it into a noun, a store of brushed-aside material. The dog is digging into whatever the speaker has tried not to mind. "Mind" also carries its double sense of brain and of caring, so the pun runs through the whole phrase.
The diction supports this. Most of the poem is short, plain words: dog, tail, dig, hole. "Trepan" is clinical and learned, and it sits among them like a surgeon at a dog park. "Strange to so trepan" also sounds like someone stepping back to observe his own frenzy with dry surprise, so a cooler human voice seems to comment on the animal one. That is an inference from the tone, but it explains why the poem is funny and unsettling at once.
There is no rhyme in the usual sense, but the sound is tightly woven. The short *i* repeats in "kill," "tip," "dig," "mist" and "rich," giving the poem a clipped, scratching quality. "Mind" and "mist" differ by a single letter, as if the thought has been worn down by the digging. The lines also shrink. Counting syllables gives 7, 7, 6, 5, 5, 4, so the poem narrows as it goes, like a hole being bored. Each stanza begins with a transitive verb left hanging over the line break ("kill / that tip," "trepan / my own"), so each enjambment feels like a lunge.
The ending is the real surprise. After killing, digging and drilling, we expect blood, bone or darkness. Instead we get "My mist is rich." Mist is vague and vaporous, the opposite of a hard result, and "rich" is an unexpected word for it. It may suggest fertility, since rich is how we describe soil, and that would link back to the digging (this is my reading, not something the poem states). The last line is also the shortest, a complete sentence ending on a full stop, and it can be read as boast, consolation or irony. The poem never says whether the obsessive digging is a torment or a method.
That openness is where the poem's significance lies. In about twenty-five words, Bonta takes two worn-out images, the dog chasing its tail and the person digging a hole, and makes them literal enough to hurt. He then shows the same compulsion producing something, and he leaves us unsure whether that is a rescue or another joke on the dog. For a student reader, "Dogged" shows how much a pun, a clash of vocabulary and a shrinking line can do. It rewards a second reading, because nearly every phrase turns out to mean two things.