Six short lines, no punctuation and no rhyme, yet Dave Bonta's "Prevaricator" sounds like a confession from someone unsure he is allowed to make it. The title is the first piece of evasion. A prevaricator dodges the straight answer and talks around the truth. The speaker seems to introduce himself under that label, then spends six lines either admitting something real or doing exactly what the title promises. The poem never says which. Its central idea, as I read it, is that a mind which lives on uncertainty can drift away from the body, and that the distance becomes a debt that keeps growing.
The first line, "I traffic in doubt", sets up the poem's commercial language. To traffic is to trade, and the word often suggests something illicit, as in smuggling or dealing. Doubt becomes a product. The next line pushes the idea further: "an altered state that I must not visit." "Altered state" belongs to the vocabulary of drugs and trances, so the speaker comes across as a dealer who cannot sample his own supply. That is a neat paradox. He sells uncertainty but is forbidden to enter it, which may be what a prevaricator does: keep others in doubt while staying safely outside it himself. That is an interpretation, since the poem never says who made the rule. "Must not" has no named enforcer, so the prohibition feels self-imposed. The line is also twice as long as the one before it (ten syllables against five), as if the sentence swells to fit the restriction.
Then comes the turn: "but my own body was / the world I lacked most." The line break after "was" matters. For a moment the sentence seems to be making a plain statement, and then "lacked" arrives and turns it into an absence. "My own" insists on ownership, which makes the lack stranger. How can you lack the thing you cannot get away from? The body is also called a "world", far bigger than the "state" of the previous stanza. One is a place you visit and the other is a place you live. The past tense suggests the speaker is looking back, perhaps from a life spent in the head, among arguments and evasions, while the physical self went unvisited.
The last couplet turns this lack into a figure of speech: "like a debt run / farther and farther up." The financial thread (traffic, lacked, debt) is now complete. The idiom "run up a debt" is split across the line break, so "run" ends one line and "up" ends the poem. The debt seems to keep running on after the sentence has stopped. "Farther and farther" is the poem's only repetition, and the only place the language lets itself go. The rhythm opens out as well, from four syllables to six, and the poem stops on "up" with no full stop. Nothing is paid off and nothing is closed. It is also odd to measure a debt in "farther" rather than "bigger", because farther is a word for distance. The image suggests that the more the speaker trades in doubt, the further he walks from his body.
The sound patterns are quiet but suggestive. The three key nouns, "doubt", "body" and "debt", are all built from d and b, and "doubt" and "debt" both carry a silent b. I would not claim the poet planned it, but the echo links the three ideas. Doubt leads to debt, and the body is what is owed.
The form supports all this. There are three tidy couplets, with no capitals at the starts of lines and no punctuation. Without commas or full stops, the reader has to decide where each thought ends, and "my own body was" can be heard as a complete claim before the next line changes it. In this way the poem makes us a little uncertain too.
What makes "Prevaricator" worth reading is its compression and its honesty. It turns an abstract problem, living too much in the mind, into a metaphor of trade and debt that anyone can feel. And a poem titled for an evasive speaker contains one thing that is not evasive: the plain admission that the speaker lacked his own body most of all.