Eight short lines, and a whole character is already sitting at his own table. In Dave Bonta's "Miser," the speaker announces, with the satisfaction of a man describing a bargain, that he finds "great convenience / in having my stomach / as a clock." On the surface this is simple thrift: why buy a timepiece when hunger will tell you when to eat? But the second stanza swerves. "A clock is a gun / for heirs to make / the best of a bad market." What began as a joke about saving money turns into a joke about death, and the central idea comes into focus. For a miser, time and money are the same thing, and both are being watched by people who want what he has.
The gun image is deliberately slippery, and the poem never explains it. One reading is that a clock works like a starting pistol: every tick brings the heirs closer to their inheritance, so a clock in the house is a weapon pointed at the miser's future. Another is that the clock literally "shoots" him, since time is what kills him. The phrase "make the best of a bad market" is a twist on the familiar idiom about making the best of a bad job. It hints that the heirs are speculators who will cash in whatever they inherit, however poor the conditions. Judging by this language, the speaker pictures his relatives as traders waiting for a signal. That is a suspicious, even paranoid view, and the poem lets us enjoy it and be unsettled by it at once.
The construction mimics a tidy argument. The stanzas run three lines, three lines, then two, so the poem narrows like a funnel toward its conclusion. The small connecting words do the work of logic: "for" supplies a reason, and "so" draws a result. The reasoning is absurd, since nothing about a stomach follows from a gun, but the confident tone makes it sound airtight. That gap between a calm voice and a strange premise is where the humor lives. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines vary from three syllables ("as a clock") to seven ("the best of a bad market"). The shortest line sits alone at the end of the first stanza, like a pause before a punchline.
Sound does quiet work too. The hard *k* of "clock" returns in "make" and "market," a faint ticking running under the poem even as the speaker claims to have abandoned clocks. The word "clock" also ends stanza one and opens stanza two, linking them like two ticks in a row. In the final stanza the vowels soften and chime: "find," "dine," and "kindly" share a long *i*, and the poem closes on the round, shut-door sound of "home."
The vocabulary matters as much as the sound. "Convenience," "market," and "heirs" are words from commerce and property, and the speaker applies them to his own body and mortality. Against them, "gun" lands as the one violent word. Then comes the final pair of lines: "so we part very kindly / and I dine at home." The "we" is open. It could mean the speaker and the clock, or the speaker and his heirs, or him and a social world of dinner invitations run by the clock. In every case the courtesy is ironic. "Dine" is a grand word for a solitary, inexpensive meal, and the pompous verb makes the miser both funny and a little sad. Home is where he is safe from invitations, from expenses, and perhaps from the very people he suspects.
That mix of comedy and chill is what makes the poem worth reading. It compresses a familiar type, the miser, into a few lines without any lecture on greed. The cleverest touch is the irony underneath: a man who has refused to own a clock has not escaped time at all. His stomach still keeps it, and a body, like any clock, runs down.