Eight short lines, no punctuation, no rhyme, and a title that announces its subject like a diagnosis. Dave Bonta's "Self-destructive" is about a part of something turning on the whole it belongs to. In the first stanza the part is a hand and the whole is a body. In the second the part is time itself: "now and yesterday" are set against "tomorrow" and "next week." The poem never says which of these is the real subject, and that refusal is much of its interest.
The opening, "what what artifice," sounds like a stammer. The doubled "what" could be a question, an exclamation, or someone catching their breath at something they can't quite believe. "Artifice" is a rich, double-edged word. It can mean skill and craft, or it can mean trickery, and the poem doesn't choose. The next line adds to the unease: "taking the moment unobserved." The grammar is loose enough that "unobserved" could describe the hand, the moment, or the act of taking, so even the sentence slips away unwatched. Then comes the blunt claim that "the hand has wherewithal / to kill the whole body." "Wherewithal" is a slightly formal word meaning the means or ability to do something, and it makes the violence sound almost administrative. Its "wh" sound also echoes the opening "what what," as if the stammer were resolving into a cold, competent word. The image is a kind of synecdoche turned inside out. We usually let a hand stand for a whole person ("all hands on deck"), but here the part is a separate agent with its own intentions, and it can do the whole body in.
The second stanza changes the scene without warning. "Two horses for now and yesterday / were foretold." It is hard to say who foretold them or why horses, though I read them as a pair of animals harnessed to the present and the past, a team that pulls forward only as far as today. What they are foretold to do is "unthank tomorrow / and dispose of all next week." "Unthank" is an unusual, almost coined-sounding verb. It treats tomorrow as a gift that can be refused, and refused ungratefully. "Dispose" is as flat and clinical as "wherewithal," like clearing out a cupboard. The pattern echoes the first stanza: the hand kills the body it belongs to, and the past and present cancel the future they lead to. Both stanzas also contain a word beginning with "un-" (unobserved, unthank), a small shared gesture of negation.
There is a paradox here too. The horses "were foretold," so the future is being predicted in the very act of being erased. Whatever is destroyed was already expected to be destroyed, which gives the poem a fatalistic chill. Nothing in the text says whether this is despair, illness, addiction, or something more abstract, and I think it is wiser to say so than to pretend otherwise. The poem's imagery supports several readings without confirming any of them.
The sound and shape of the poem do much of the work. The lines are short and uneven, with no regular metre, so the rhythm is closer to speech with its breath held than to song. The absence of end rhyme stops anything from clicking shut neatly. Instead the music lives inside the lines: the soft h-sounds of "the hand has wherewithal," the three t's crowding "to unthank tomorrow," the long vowels of "whole body." The lack of full stops matters as well. The poem simply stops after "next week," and the effect is a little like its own subject, a sentence that disposes of whatever would have come next. It is also hard not to notice that a poem is made by a hand. If "artifice" points at the writing itself, the poem has a faint, uncomfortable self-awareness, a made thing describing the made thing's capacity to destroy. That is my inference from the word, not something the text states.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it compresses. In eight lines it gives us a small, strange model of self-sabotage, in which the pieces of a thing, whether limbs or days, act against the whole that holds them together. It also trusts the reader. It supplies no backstory and no moral, only odd, exact words and an uneasy tone, and we have to decide what the hand and the horses stand for. A poem this brief can leave a larger shadow than a long one, and here the shadow falls on tomorrow.