Belief, in Dave Bonta's poem, starts out as homework. "I think that I should believe so I believe": the speaker's logic is almost comically circular, as if faith were a duty to be got through rather than a feeling to be had. What he chooses to believe in is not God or heaven but "death", and only "every other day", as though he were following a timetable for exercise or medicine. The joke is gentle but pointed. Death is the one article of faith that needs no leap, so rationing one's commitment to it quietly mocks the idea of belief as a discipline, even while the poem admits a real pull toward the subject.
The second stanza is the strangest. "I admire that nothing / a plain picture hung on the wall." With no punctuation, the grammar slips. Is the picture a description of the nothing, or a separate thing the speaker admires? The most natural reading is that nothingness has been framed and hung up like a piece of household art. The line break matters here: "nothing" sits alone at the end of its line for a beat, bare and enormous, before the domestic image shrinks it down. "Admire" does double duty, since we admire paintings and we admire people who face hard things calmly. "Plain" suggests that death, for this speaker, should be looked at without drama, something you can live beside and glance at while passing.
Then comes the turn, signalled by a single "but". "I believe too in kindness / and a little talk / and a great deal of supper." Two things have changed. The nagging "should" has gone, so this belief needs no justification. And the word "too" shows that the speaker is not renouncing the first stanza, only balancing it. The list is also measured in quantities that are funny and true to life: "a little" talk, but "a great deal" of supper. Judging by the imagery, the speaker trusts what can be set on a table. The list slides from the abstract (kindness) to the activity (talk) to the edible (supper), as though kindness only becomes believable once it arrives on a plate. "Supper" is a homely, slightly old-fashioned word, warmer than "dinner" and far warmer than "food". It suggests company, evening and the close of the day, which may faintly echo the poem's first subject.
The form supports this modesty. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no punctuation at all, so the thought drifts along like talk across a table. The first line is long and winding, the middle stanza shrinks to fragments, and the last stanza grows again through its repeated "and", accumulating like second helpings. The vocabulary is almost entirely short, everyday words. "Believe" appears three times, and the repetition wears the word down until it loses its solemnity. Small sound patterns help too. "Death" and "nothing" share their thin "th", and "plain picture" gives a neat pair of p's. In the final line the stresses fall heavily on "great deal of supper", a slow, full-mouthed rhythm that sounds like satisfaction, in contrast to the clipped "death" many lines earlier.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes an enormous question, what we put our trust in and how we live with mortality, and answers with humour instead of solemnity. It does not deny death or sneer at it. It grants death a place on the wall and gives the table the last word. The title "Believer" turns out to be ironic and sincere at once. This speaker's creed is not a doctrine but a short, practical list of things that make days bearable. A single "but" does the work of an argument, and a reader finishes the poem with a sense of having been talked into something sensible and a little hungry.