Six lines, three couplets and almost no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "User" gives the reader very little to hold, then warns against making more of it than is there. It moves from a strange, violent image to a brief memory of calm and ends on an instruction. The title is the poem's biggest open question. With "high and higher" in the first line, it is tempting to hear a drug user, and "an hour or two" fits the length of a high. But "user" could just as easily mean someone who uses a machine, or uses other people. Judging by the text alone, the poem doesn't decide, and the ambiguity is part of its design.
The first couplet is the hardest to settle. "high and higher like a messenger / hanging herself with her own hand" has no clear subject, so the grammar floats, just as the line seems to. The simile is odd. A messenger exists to carry someone else's words, yet this one acts entirely on her own, and the phrase "her own hand" insists on that ownership. The verb is double-edged as well: "hanging" can mean suspended in the air, which sits easily beside "high and higher," or it can mean a noose. Rising and dying are folded into one motion. The sound reinforces this. Six words in these two lines begin with a breathy *h* (high, higher, hanging, herself, her, hand), so the couplet seems to pant as it climbs.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is quiet. "an hour or two of simplicity / where I was open and sufficient" brings in the first-person pronoun for the only time. It also swaps the high drama of the opening for modest measurement. Two hours at most, and the claim is not happiness or freedom but being "sufficient," a dry, almost bookkeeping word meaning *enough, and no more*. "Open" is the counterweight to the earlier hand. An open person, like an open hand, holds nothing and hides nothing, and that is a long way from a hand used for hanging. The grammar is worth noticing, too. "Where" treats time as a place the speaker once stood in, and "was" makes clear they have left it. The calm is remembered, not present.
The final couplet gives an order: "do not tell tales / concerning pain." Nearly every word is a single syllable, which makes the command blunt and final. "Concerning" is the only longer, more formal word, and it gives the sentence the tone of a rule or a warning label. Who is being addressed is left open. It could be the reader, the speaker talking to themselves, or the messenger of the first couplet, whose job was to carry tales. The word "tales" suggests embellishment, the shaping of suffering into a story with a shape, a moral and a hero. The poem's own first image was close to such a story, a figure and a death, so the ending can feel like the poem catching itself and pulling back.
The form supports this refusal. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The first four lines run to roughly eight or nine syllables, then the last two shrink to about four each, so the poem tightens into silence as it ends. With no full stop at the close, nothing is tied off or resolved. The couplets are linked by pressure and contrast, not by sound or argument: a death-like image, a gentle memory, a prohibition. The reader has to supply the connections, which is a kind of discipline, since the poem will not explain itself.
What makes "User" worth reading is that it manages pain by withholding. Many poems about suffering lean on confession or narrative. This one offers a single hard image, a small unit of relief measured in hours, and a rule against dramatizing either. It trusts the reader to feel the weight of what is left out, and it leaves its central ambiguities (who the user is, what the messenger carries, what pain is meant) deliberately unresolved. A poem this short cannot hide behind length, and every word, from "sufficient" to "concerning," has to do real work.