A creed usually pledges faith in something grand: a god, a country, a hope. Dave Bonta's "Masochist" opens with "I believe in pain," and the formula sounds solemn and slightly outrageous at once. The rest is only seven short lines, but it turns a bodily complaint into a small philosophy. The poem suggests that pain is not merely endured but trusted, as evidence that the speaker is really in contact with something.
The title matters. "Masochist" is a clinical, faintly accusing label, and the poem never mentions pleasure. Nothing here is enjoyed. What the speaker offers is belief, which is a different thing. The title reads like a diagnosis that other people might give, or that the speaker gives himself with dry self-mockery, while the poem itself describes something closer to faith. The gap between the word and the lines is where the tension sits. Is this perversion, or a stubborn kind of honesty about how effort feels?
The central image comes in the second line: "a rose of stone in the lower back." It joins opposites. A rose is soft, layered and fragrant, and it suggests something opening. Stone is heavy, closed and permanent. Together they describe chronic pain precisely, as something that blooms in the body yet feels petrified, a knot with a shape and a slow, unwelcome growth. The location is also ordinary. The lower back is where tired muscles and long labour tend to lodge their complaints, so the "rose" belongs to everyday physical life, not to a dramatic wound. Judging by the imagery, the pain is something earned or accumulated, not inflicted from outside.
The second stanza supplies the effort behind it: "I break an oar / in I know not what / great water." Rowing is work done mostly with the back, so the two stanzas quietly connect. The stone in the spine and the broken oar belong to the same story of straining against something. The phrasing shifts register here. "I know not what" is old-fashioned, almost biblical inversion, set against the plain modern speech of "I believe in pain." The shift lends the sea a mythic weight, and it admits ignorance. The speaker does not know what the water is. He only knows he has pushed hard enough to break his tool.
The construction is spare, and the poem uses that to enact its meaning. There is no rhyme scheme and no punctuation, not even a closing full stop, so the poem ends without sealing itself off, much as water has no edge to meet. Yet sound works quietly beneath the surface. The long *o* of "rose," "stone," "oar" and "know" repeats like a low groan. "Break" and "back" share their opening and closing consonants, which ties the snapped oar to the aching spine. "Break" also chimes with "great," a near-rhyme that falls between the second stanza's first line and its last and gives the fragment a faint sense of closure.
The line lengths do some of the work as well. The first line is brief and declarative. The second stretches into a longer, heavier line, weighed down by clustered monosyllables, just as the pain weighs down the body. In the final stanza the lines shrink, "I break an oar," then "in I know not what," then just "great water," so the poem narrows as the vastness widens. The biggest idea gets the smallest space. The line break after "in I know not what" also repeats the preposition from "I believe in," so belief and ignorance share the same small word. The speaker believes *in* pain and breaks the oar *in* the unknown, and the poem makes no clear distinction between the two.
That is much of what makes it worth reading. In very few words it declines to explain or console. It does not say why the water matters or whether the effort was worthwhile. It offers a paradox, a broken tool, an ache that feels like a flower made of stone, and it leaves the reader to decide whether this is despair, stubbornness or a strange kind of devotion.