Seven short lines, and nearly every one seems to pull against the one before it. That friction is the poem's method, and it is also its point. Dave Bonta's "The perils of indolence" gives us a title that promises a moral lesson and then delivers something closer to a riddle, so the reader has to work out what laziness has to do with apes, legs and sticks.
The first sentence sets the puzzle: "An ape should be locked up / in case he should die." On the surface it is a precaution, but it defeats itself. A cage cannot keep death away, and a creature that can only sit in one place is already close to the stillness it is being protected from. The wording helps. "Should" appears twice in two lines, giving the voice the flat confidence of a rule that has never been questioned. The choice of "ape" may also matter. The verb "to ape" means to copy, so the word hints at a creature that imitates instead of acting for itself, though the poem never says so outright.
Then the poem changes direction. "Do not sit down" is an order, and it is the plain opposite of the cage. Where the first lines were impersonal and third-person ("he"), the voice now speaks directly to someone, and what it addresses is the body: "my brother Leg, / my brother Stick!" The kinship is odd but affecting. A leg is part of the speaker, while a stick is a tool, yet both are called brothers, as if a walking aid had the same standing as flesh. Anyone who has leaned on a staff knows it works as a third leg, and the poem seems to rely on that. The exclamation mark on "Stick!" is the only one in the poem. It marks the point where the speaker's plea becomes urgent.
The final two lines complicate the picture. "The latter I carried and feared— / of all brethren, the king." Now the speaker is "I," so the poem has moved from "he" to "my" to "I," as though the caged ape and the speaker were closing in on each other. The stick is something carried, which makes it a burden or a support. It is also something feared, which makes it a threat, perhaps a thing that could drive a body onward, perhaps a reminder of what the body will one day need. The poem does not choose between these. The dash before the last line works like a held breath, and what follows is a surprise of rank: the made object is "king" over the born limbs. The vocabulary shifts here too. "Latter" and "brethren" sound formal and almost biblical after the blunt "ape," "Leg" and "Stick," so the speaker seems to be putting on a ceremonial voice just as the stick is crowned.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is loose, but the lines are shaped with care. The three lines of the central command are nearly equal in weight, four syllables each, and the repeated "my brother" gives them a marching beat, a chant against sitting. Then the line lengthens to "The latter I carried and feared," as if the walker had stopped to look back at what he has been leaning on. The sound is worth hearing as well. Hard k sounds run through the poem: "locked," "case," "Stick," "carried," "king." They click and knock like a cage latch or a stick on stone, which gives the abstract idea a physical, percussive texture.
The poem is worth reading because it gets so much from so little. It never explains itself, and its logic is closer to a dream or a proverb than to an argument, yet an idea comes through: safety taken far enough turns into a kind of death, while movement, with all the things we lean on and fear, is what keeps us alive. Read this way, "indolence" is more than laziness. It is the choice to be locked up, to sit down, to let someone else's caution do your living. The poem is also strong enough to stand without a biography behind it, because everything it needs, the cage, the order and the crowned stick, is already on the page.