Few poems turn a body part into an informer as quickly as this one. In its first line, Dave Bonta's speaker discovers he is being discussed, and the gossips are his own hands. The title, "Sign language," explains how. These hands speak in gesture, silently, and what they say is damning: they describe him as "full of life as a grave."
That simile is cleverer than it first looks. We would normally say someone is "empty of life," but the poem says "full," and a grave is indeed full, of the dead. So the comparison reads two ways. The speaker may be lifeless, or he may be crowded with endings and losses. The syntax adds another wobble. The phrase could describe him, or it could describe the talk itself, flat and deadpan. "Talk about me" also has the sound of talking behind someone's back, except here the back belongs to the speaker. "My own" insists that the hands are his, while the rest of the line shows how far he has drifted from them.
The second stanza changes voice. The "I" disappears, and "kill with them / and they go still" arrives with no "if" and no "you." It sounds like a rule of cause and effect, or a dare. The line break after "them" leaves the pronoun hanging, so the hands are held up for inspection before we learn what they might do. Then comes the poem's only true rhyme: *kill* and *still*. One chime, and it binds violence to silence. For hands that speak in sign, stillness means saying nothing, so killing is the act that ends their speech. It also brings back the grave. The killer's hands go as still as the dead, so the first stanza's image of lifelessness returns as a consequence. Judging by the way the lines echo each other, the poem seems to suggest that the capacity for harm and the sense of being dead inside are tangled together.
The last line turns from threat to something closer to sorrow: "love is the trade they never want." A trade is a craft, the thing hands are for, whether carpentry, pottery or surgery. It is also a bargain, an exchange with a price. Calling love a "trade" makes it work rather than a feeling, something hands could do for a living. The poem then says they never want it. The verb is slippery, because *want* can mean desire and it can mean lack. Either the hands refuse love as an occupation, or they are always short of it, never offered it. The poem does not choose, and ending on "want" leaves the whole piece hanging on that word.
The form matches the idea. There is no punctuation and there are no capital letters. Almost every word is short and plain: *talk, life, grave, kill, still, love, trade, want*. The lines move from two long, drifting ones in the first stanza to three clipped ones, and the closing line settles into a steady, nearly proverbial beat with three strong stresses: love is the TRADE they NEVer WANT. Repeated *th* sounds in "them," "they," "the" and "that" give the second stanza a hushed, hissing undertone. The *l* in *life*, *kill*, *still* and *love* threads through the poem, quietly linking the words that matter most.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a familiar fear, that we might not be the person we hope we are, and moves the judgement outside the speaker, into the most expressive and most dangerous part of the body. The hands can caress, sign, build or strike, and the poem will not say which they will choose. It offers no comfort and no confession, only a short list of possibilities with silence on either side. A reader may finish it unsure whether the hands are lying, or whether they are the one honest witness the speaker has.