Four lines, no punctuation, no rhyme, and still Dave Bonta's "Vicarious" manages to describe a whole private economy of longing. The speaker tells us how he handles his desire: not by acting on it, but by looking at "pictures of hands." The title explains why. "Vicarious" comes from a Latin word for a substitute, and everything in the poem is a stand-in. The hands in the pictures are not the speaker's, the touch is not real, and the satisfaction is secondhand. The central idea is that desire, when it cannot be fed directly, gets managed, stocked and hoarded, and that this changes it into something a little shameful and a little comic.
The verb "tend" carries much of this. We tend a garden, a fire, a flock, a shop. The word suggests patient, affectionate upkeep, which makes desire sound like a small domestic responsibility, a plant on a windowsill. It also hints at routine and a little loneliness, since nobody tends something that is being satisfied. The speaker keeps his desire alive without letting it do anything. The "pictures of hands" are specific and strange. Hands are the body's instruments of touch, so they stand in for everything the speaker is missing. They are also a modest choice. He does not say faces or bodies, only hands, as if desire has been boiled down to its smallest, most deniable unit.
Then comes the simile, which does not behave as expected. A tar merchant is a very unglamorous figure: a trader in something black, sticky and smelly. Tar clings and stains, and it is used to seal and preserve, so desire here is something that sticks to you and cannot be washed off. The phrase "greedy for the night" is the odd part. A merchant of darkness would naturally want more darkness, and night is the largest supply of it. Desire, the poem implies, thrives in the dark, and the speaker's appetite for pictures is really an appetite for private hours when no one sees what he is doing. The word "greedy" also turns the tender gardener of the first line into a trader piling up goods. Tending becomes hoarding.
The syntax adds to this. Because there is no punctuation, and because the line break falls right after "hands," the simile can attach to more than one thing. "Like a tar merchant" might describe how the speaker tends his desire. It might also describe the hands themselves, as though the pictured hands were groping greedily toward night. The poem does not settle the question, and the ambiguity lets the speaker's appetite spread into the images he looks at.
The sound is quiet and tightly controlled. The lines are short, roughly five or six syllables each, with two or three stresses, so the poem moves in small, careful steps. Nothing rhymes, but a long "i" sound runs through it: "I," "my," "desire," "like," "night." The speaker and his longing are linked to the darkness by sound before the final word arrives. That last word, "night," is a stressed monosyllable, and the poem ends on it without a full stop, so the line seems to drift into the dark it describes. The hard consonants of "tend," "tar," "merchant" and "greedy" give the middle lines a slightly gritty, commercial texture that contrasts with the soft word "desire."
What makes the poem worth reading is its compression and its honesty. In two couplets it does what longer poems about longing often fail to do: it admits that desire is not always noble or romantic. It can be a habit, a stockpile, a private trade. The poem does not judge the speaker and does not excuse him either. Its refusal to explain leaves a space the reader fills with their own experience. Reading it today, one might also think of how much modern desire is conducted through images of other people, though the poem itself never says so. The single comparison to the tar merchant makes the speaker both pitiable and slightly absurd, and that mix of sympathy and wry self-awareness gives the poem its pull.