A busker is supposed to be in charge of the music: he picks the spot on the pavement, the tune, the moment to start. Dave Bonta's five-line poem quietly reverses this. The instrument does the talking, and everything it says is a put-down. It tells the speaker to "fit myself for bed," then tells "a beggar to meddle / or make wit." What looks like a street scene becomes a small, sour portrait of a performer who is bossed about by his own tool.
The central idea, as I read it, is the uneasy position of the street musician, caught between artist and beggar. The title promises the first and the fourth line delivers the second. Notice the slide from "me" to "a beggar." In line three the speaker is personal and singular. By line four he has shrunk into a type, the label a passer-by might give him. The instrument seems to voice that outside judgement, and it does so without any softening.
The central image is the simile "like a fat foot with no bone." The poem never names the instrument. Judging by the picture, it is something soft, swollen and shapeless, perhaps a squeezebox of some kind, though that is a guess. The comparison is deliberately ungainly. A foot is the humblest part of the body, the part that tramps the pavement all day and aches by evening, and "fat" and "no bone" strip it of any firmness or backbone. That gives a comic contradiction, a thing with no spine that still issues commands. It also suggests why the first command is "fit myself for bed." The instrument sounds like the speaker's own tiredness talking, the way a sore foot announces that the day is over. The verb "fit" is odd here, as though bed were a garment to be measured for. The poem doesn't push that further, but the strangeness is enough to make the line linger.
The construction is tight and slightly lopsided. There is no regular rhyme scheme and almost no punctuation, only one comma and a closing full stop. The lines run 4, 7, 8, 7 and 3 syllables. They swell through the middle and then drop away, so the last line, "or make wit," arrives like a tune cut off mid-phrase. The poem's one full rhyme is a distant one, "fit" in line three against "wit" in line five. The two words sit at the ends of the speaker's two options: give up and go to bed, or carry on by cleverness.
Sound does a lot of the work. "Fat foot," "fit" and "for" make a soft, flat thud of f-sounds, like a heavy tread. The short e of "instrument," "tells," "bed," "beggar" and "meddle" keeps returning, giving the poem a dull, pattering beat with little melody in it. That is a witty choice in a poem about music. "Tells" is repeated at the start of two lines, and the instrument never sings. It only issues instructions. The verb also plays on the idea of a tune "telling" a story, but all that is told here are orders.
The last line is the most puzzling and the most rewarding. "Meddle or make wit" twists the familiar phrase "make do," and the substitution matters. "Meddle" can mean to interfere or pester, which is one way a busker gets noticed. It can also mean to fiddle with the instrument, to tinker. "Make wit" suggests producing cleverness or amusement on demand, living by one's wits for the sake of coins. The poem offers these two options and stops. Nothing is resolved, which leaves the reader hanging like an unfinished note.
The poem is worth reading for how much it packs into so little. In about twenty-five words it gives us a character, a power reversal, a joke and a hint of weariness, and it never names the instrument or sets the scene. The reader has to supply the street, the crowd and the coins. Its main achievement is to make a familiar figure uncomfortable. We usually think of buskers as people who serve us with music, and Bonta asks who is serving whom.