We usually say "wearing many hats" about someone who is busy: parent, cook, taxi driver, referee. Dave Bonta's "Hat wearer" takes that tired idiom literally and gets something stranger out of it. The speaker has "a hat I had for every matter," and the poem unrolls them one by one until the list stops being a joke about wardrobes and becomes a quiet portrait of a whole life lived in costumes.
The opening line already does a lot of work. "Hat," "had" and "matter" share the same short, flat vowel, so the line sounds like a shrug, a casual boast. There is also a small pun in "matter," which can mean a task, a problem, or substance itself. A hat for every matter suggests a person with a response ready for everything, though also perhaps someone who has never faced a situation bare-headed.
What follows is built on repetition. "A hat for show / a hat for wind / a hat for peace / a hat for war" has the stripped-down rhythm of a chant or a child's counting rhyme. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, only the steady return of "a hat for." That sameness is the poem's trick, because it flattens very different things onto one level. Showing off and sheltering from wind sit beside peace and war as if they were equally ordinary reasons to reach for headgear. The pairs are balanced too: "show" against "wind" (vanity against practicality), "peace" against "war." The pattern lulls us into expecting symmetry.
Then it breaks. "A hat for doing hurt" is longer and heavier than its neighbours, and it has no opposite. Nothing follows it like "a hat for healing." The plain, blunt word "hurt" also admits something the earlier lines avoid. A hat here works as a disguise, a way of becoming someone else just enough to do harm without feeling like yourself. The speaker says this in the same breezy tone as everything else, which is unsettling. We cannot tell whether that tone shows ease, shame, or numbness.
The final movement changes the poem's direction. "And a hat for this rain" brings in the little word "and," which tells us the list is ending, but it also swaps the general for the specific. Until now the hats belonged to categories ("show," "war"); this one belongs to a particular rain, with "this" pointing at something happening now. The tense shifts as well. The poem begins in the past ("I had"), but the closing line is present and continuing: "keeping me company till night." The speaker seems to have moved from reciting a history to standing in a single afternoon, perhaps still wearing that last hat.
That last line also carries a pleasing ambiguity. Grammatically, what keeps the speaker company could be the hat or the rain, and the poem never decides. Either reading changes the tone of the whole piece. After a list of roles, the speaker is finally accompanied rather than performing. "Till night" adds a faint sense of closing in, since the day ends and the hats may be put away. The poem does not say what is under them, and I think that silence is the point. The speaker has described himself entirely through what he puts on his head, and the title, "Hat wearer," makes the same move by naming him with a job rather than a name.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into so few words. It starts out amusing, with its comic inventory and its playful tone. Yet the short, even lines let the darker item, "doing hurt," slip through unnoticed, and the gentler ending leaves it hanging in the air. A reader is left asking whether the roles we adopt for different occasions are only protection or also an excuse. The poem offers no verdict. It simply lets a rainy hat, kept on until dark, stand as the one honest moment among all the performances.