Five short lines, no punctuation, and a whole emotional comedown packed inside them. Dave Bonta's "After the campaign" opens with a burst of wishing and ends with a small, almost embarrassed remark about digestion. The gap between those two moods is the poem's subject: what happens to large ambitions, or large efforts, once the effort is over and the body presents its bill. The title never says what the campaign was. The musket points toward war, but a political or personal ordeal would fit just as well. That openness lets any exhausted reader step in.
The first stanza is a list of wishes, and they pull in different directions. "O to sink into a silver spoon" begins with an old-fashioned exclamation, the sort of "O" that belongs to grand lyric poetry, and then asks for something absurd. Nobody can sink into a spoon. The phrase still carries meaning. Silver spoons suggest ease and privilege, and a spoon is also what feeds a baby or delivers medicine. The wish seems to be for comfort, for being made small and cared for. The sound supports it: *sink*, *silver*, *spoon* repeat the soft "s" and let the line slide downward.
The second line changes the mood at once. "Give a blow like a musket" swaps sibilants for hard stops, the "b" of *blow* and the "k" of *musket*. The rhythm turns jerky and the line is shorter, as if it were recoiling. The phrasing is slightly odd, because a musket fires rather than gives a blow, and *blow* can mean a punch, a shock, or a puff of breath. The speaker wants to be forceful here, which contradicts the wish to dissolve into a spoon. The poem seems to be listing the ways a person might wish to be different from the way they are.
The third wish is the most intriguing: "or make a cheap experiment with change." *Change* works two ways. It can mean small coins, which echoes the silver of the spoon and brings money into the poem, and it can mean transformation. *Cheap* adds to the double meaning, since it suggests low cost and low stakes but also something shabby. The line is the longest of the five, ten syllables, and *experiment* is a clinical, many-syllabled word among plain ones. The wishes have moved from comfort to violence to a tentative, bargain-priced try at altering oneself. Each is a small way out of the present.
Then the second stanza arrives and, for the first time, there is a person in the poem. The wishes have all been subjectless infinitives (*to sink, give, make*), floating free of anyone. Now comes "I put off a meeting," flat and practical. The simple words *put off* even carry a quiet double sense, since to be put off is also to feel repelled. The final line, "for less trouble in my stomach," is the poem's punch line, and it is a deflating one. The speaker asks for *less* trouble, not none, which is a modest bargain. After the musket and the silver, the body has the last word. The old saying that an army marches on its stomach hangs in the background here, and the stomach, judging by the poem, has brought this campaign to a halt.
Structurally, the poem has no rhyme and no end punctuation, so the lines drift into each other as a tired mind might. The shift from a three-line stanza to a two-line one mirrors the shift in scale, from imagination to the ordinary fact of a postponed meeting. The syllable counts also shrink and settle, from nine and seven and ten in the first stanza to six and eight in the second.
The poem matters because it is honest about what aftermath feels like. Large-sounding words (*campaign*, *musket*, *experiment*) are cut down by a gut complaint, and the poem does not explain or console. The speaker's fantasies of escape, strength and change are real, but so is the stomach, and the poem lets that small physical fact outweigh them. That judgment is funny and a little sad, and it is made in only five lines.