A man announces he will kill the sun, and six lines later he has become a piece of décor. That slide from cosmic violence to interior design makes Dave Bonta's "Solicidal" both unsettling and oddly funny. The speaker keeps everything at arm's length. He simply "find[s]" the man, the way you might come across a stray object, and reports what he overhears. Nothing is explained. We have to decide whether we have met a lunatic, a rebel or someone in despair, and the poem hints he may be all three.
The title does a great deal of the work. "Sol" is the Latin word for sun, "-cide" belongs to words about killing, and the whole coinage sounds almost exactly like "suicidal." So the threat against the sun carries a second meaning: an attack on the source of light and life may also be an attack on oneself. The poem never says so outright, but its final image pushes that way.
The simile "like a bat in the palace" is the strangest image and the most revealing. A bat is a creature of darkness, so it is a natural enemy of daylight. Loose in a palace, it is also an intruder in a place of order and grandeur, flapping where it does not belong. The phrase seems to lean on the idiom "bats in the belfry," with "palace" swapped in, so that madness is folded into the picture. Judging by the imagery, suns and palaces both suggest power and display, which makes the man's talk a small, shrill revolt against brightness and authority. Notice too that he is only "talking of murdering." The deed stays in the realm of speech.
The second sentence turns the poem. "He went to London / to hang like a picture" makes hanging sound like a career move, a purpose with a destination. The verb is double-edged. A picture hangs in a gallery, but a person can hang in a far darker sense, and the poem lets both meanings sit together without choosing. As a picture, the man is fixed, looked at and silent. The loud voice of the first three lines has become a surface. London, I would suggest, stands in for the places where such things get displayed, though the poem gives us nothing more specific than the name.
Then comes "all gilt and ash." Gilt is the thin gold of a picture frame, but gold is also the colour of the sun, so the man who wanted to destroy the sun ends up as a cheap, glittering imitation of it. The word also sounds exactly like "guilt," and it is hard not to hear that second meaning after a poem about murder. Ash is what fire leaves behind, whether from a burnt-out star or a cremated body. The man ends as glitter on the outside and burnt matter underneath.
The sound of the poem is plain and conversational. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, just short lines of about four to six syllables, built mostly from small, ordinary words. Yet quiet echoes hold it together. "Sun" and "London" share a dull, muffled vowel, which links the thing he wants to destroy with the place he ends up. The short *a* of "palace" returns in "hang" and "ash," so the last stretch of the poem is bound by a clipped, falling sound. The consonants harden through "talking," "murdering," "bat," "picture" and "gilt," and then the final word ends on a soft *sh*, like a breath let out. The last line is also the shortest, so the poem seems to burn down as it closes.
The grammar adds a further oddity. The speaker "find[s]" the man in the present tense, but the man's journey is told in the past: "He went." We meet him as if he is still talking, yet his fate is already settled. Time collapses in the way it does in dreams and in very compressed stories.
The poem is worth reading because it fits so much into six lines and trusts the reader to fill the gaps. A violent fantasy, a pun-heavy title, a possible suicide and a joke about art all share the same small space. One idea it leaves with us is that rage can be absorbed by being framed. It does not need to be answered, only hung on a wall and made decorative. Whether that is a rescue or a defeat is left open.