Six couplets, no capital letters, no punctuation, and a whole way of living packed inside. Dave Bonta's "Rumiesque" reads like a handful of proverbs that have been shaken until something stranger fell out. The title is the first clue. The suffix "-esque" means "in the manner of," so the poem announces itself as a piece in the spirit of Rumi, the Persian mystic poet whose work is full of wine, madness and ecstatic love. The poem's central idea is that a life guided by desire and a willingness to go wrong is worth more than one governed by duty and caution, and that the heart's irrational impulses are what we are for.
The opening couplet is a deliberate provocation: "I value nothing / more than error." We are taught to avoid mistakes, so the claim startles. It sharpens if you know that "error" comes from the Latin *errare*, to wander. Error here is less a wrong answer than a stepping off the path. The next lines push the same way: "desire life before / the service of courage." Without punctuation, this can be read as a command or as a continuation of the speaker's confession. The phrase "service of courage" is the interesting part. It makes courage something we are drafted into, like military service, and the speaker would rather follow appetite than duty. Heroism is usually praised, so putting it second is a small act of rebellion.
The poem then turns to age: "the old must suspect." You would expect the old to *know*. Bonta gives them only suspicion, which is more modest and more honest. What they suspect runs across a couplet break, as if the thought won't stay in its box: "that the mad motions of the heart / serve no purpose / but love or hatching." The word "hatching" is the poem's best surprise. It could mean eggs and new life, or it could mean plotting, as in hatching a scheme. Either way, the heart's mad motions start things. Pairing a grand word like "love" with a barnyard one like "hatching" also deflates any solemnity, and that comic undercutting keeps the poem from preaching.
After these abstractions ("error," "courage," "purpose"), the last two couplets drop into a concrete image. "The sudden motion of a cellar door / long kept locked." The repeated word *motion* quietly links the door to the heart, so the door seems to be the heart, forced open after years. The sounds help. "Long kept locked" is a run of hard, heavy syllables, with the *l* and *k* sounds clunking like a stiff bolt, and the line is one of the poem's longest, so the door swings slowly. The rhythm throughout is free, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Lines run from about four syllables ("more than error") to about nine, and the short ones feel like quick breaths or blunt statements.
The ending is the wittiest part: "and half the wine drunk / as a remedy." The opening "and" makes it feel as though we have walked in partway through the party. Half the wine is already gone, so the unlocking has happened and the consequences have begun. "Remedy" is a flat, medical word, as if getting drunk were a doctor's prescription, which makes the line deadpan and funny. It also echoes the wine of the Rumi tradition, where drunkenness stands for spiritual intoxication. Here the wine is also just wine in a cellar. The poem has no full stop, so it never concludes. It simply goes on drinking.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in so few words. It makes its argument through images rather than reasoning. The locked door and the half-empty bottle show what valuing error might look like, and we are left to decide whether the "remedy" cures anything. Judging by the title and imagery, it borrows an old tradition's vocabulary of wine, madness and love, then gives it a modern, domestic and slightly comic voice. The result is a short poem that makes recklessness sound both wise and a little ridiculous, and that may be exactly its point.