Dave Bonta's title does three jobs at once. "Sluggish" is the adjective for anything slow and heavy. It also contains the creature itself, and it brushes against the other meaning of "slug," a swig of drink. The poem's two short stanzas then play out all three. The first sketches the animal as a kind of dandy. The second gives him a drink and, with it, a bill.
The opening line is a small riddle in the form of a definition: "a slug is light lined with velvet." Slugs are glistening and soft, so "light" seems to describe the sheen on the body, but it also suggests something weightless, which sits oddly beside the word "sluggish." The word "lined" turns the slug into a garment, a coat with a velvet lining. The next line pushes the idea of fashion further: "a modish rider on foot." The slowest creature in the garden is called fashionable, as if it were sauntering down a street in good clothes. "Rider on foot" is a neat paradox too. Gastropod, the name for the slug's family, literally means "stomach-foot," and a slug travels on a single muscular foot. This rider has no horse and sits on the very thing he walks with.
The second stanza begins without any punctuation, and the stanza break is the only pause. For a split second "on foot / full of beer" can be heard as one phrase, and then the sentence turns and "full of beer" attaches to "he." The shift from the general "a slug is" to the particular "he" gives the creature a personality, a character who has had too much to drink. Anyone who has put out beer to trap garden slugs will smile at the choice. The poem never says what happens to him, but "signed and sealed" carries a sense of finality, and the poem suggests that this pleasure-seeker has reached his end.
The diction in these last lines is funny because its registers collide. "Prodigal" belongs to wastefulness and spending, and it recalls the parable of the son who squandered his inheritance. "Memorandum" belongs to the office, a short note kept for the record. A drunken slug is called a "prodigal memorandum," a spendthrift who has become a piece of paper. The legal phrase "signed and sealed" strengthens the joke. Judging by the imagery, the slug's own body might be the document, since the silvery trail a slug leaves behind looks something like a signature. That is an inference, but it fits the poem's habit of treating the animal as a writer and a text at once.
The last line, "on the arithmetic of pleasure," changes the tone. Pleasure is usually imagined as something spontaneous, and here it has sums, debits and credits. The preposition "on" suggests that the contract was drawn up over this calculation: so much enjoyment, so much cost. The slug has done the sums, or the poem has done them for him, and the result is signed and sealed.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no capital letter and no full stop, so the poem keeps the loose, unbuttoned look of free verse. Its music comes from inside the lines. The long *i* sound runs through "light," "lined," "rider" and "signed," which ties the glamorous first stanza to the final verdict. The *s* of "signed and sealed" hisses back to "slug" and the title. The line lengths do some of the work as well. The line "full of beer he is a prodigal memorandum" is the longest in the poem and sprawls like a full belly. It is followed at once by the clipped "signed and sealed," a short, hard stop before the last line unwinds again.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so little space. A creature we usually treat as a pest becomes a figure of vanity, appetite and accounting, and the poem never lectures. It lets us laugh at the slug in his velvet and then notice that his logic is not so different from ours. We also tend to weigh enjoyment against its cost, and sometimes we pay more than we planned. The slug is the most ridiculous figure in the poem and also the one who carries its serious point.