A gun that is afraid is already a strange thing, and Dave Bonta's poem stakes everything on that strangeness. Weapons in stories usually frighten other people. Here the weapon itself is nervous, and what it seems to fear is a surprising list: "trouble and pain," "my bad temper," "reading and art," "the company of a rose." Then, after a pause, comes a single longer line in which the speaker says he talks with the gun "in a whole lexicon of blood." In seven short lines, the poem sets tenderness and violence side by side and refuses to tell us which one wins.
The grammar is where the poem gets slippery. There is no punctuation and there are no capital letters, so the line breaks do all the work. Read one way, the gun is afraid of everything on the list: trouble, pain, the speaker's temper, books and art, even a rose. Read another way, the list swerves after "pain" and becomes a portrait of the man himself, someone with a bad temper who also has reading, art and a rose for company. Both readings hold, and the poem never chooses. The effect is a blur between the title's "Gunman" and the gun, so that it is hard to say where his inner life ends and the weapon's begins. Judging by this blur, the gun may be a place where the speaker parks the fears and impulses he would rather not own.
There is also a dark irony in a gun afraid of "trouble and pain," since causing them is what guns are for. A fear of reading, art and flowers is stranger still. These are soft, slow, unarmed things, and a weapon has no answer to them. They are exactly what it cannot be part of. The poem hints that the speaker lives between two selves, one that reads and one that shoots, and that the second self is the more frightened of the two.
The shape of the poem backs this up. It has no rhyme and no regular metre. The first five lines are short, running from four to seven syllables, and they fall away quietly, almost like a shy confession. Then a blank line opens and the last line stretches to about twelve syllables, as though speech is finally pouring out. The sound is carefully handled. "Gun," "trouble" and "blood" share the same short, dull vowel, so the first and last images are linked by sound as well as by meaning. "Afraid" and "pain" chime on a long *a*, which makes the fear feel close to the hurt. The final line begins with plain monosyllables ("I talk with it in a") and then rolls into the Latinate "lexicon" before landing hard on "blood," a word that ends the poem like a door shutting.
The key words are worth slowing down for. "Company" in the fifth line sets up "talk with" in the last, so the gun becomes a second companion alongside the rose. The speaker says "with," not "to," which makes it a conversation between two parties. "Lexicon" is the most bookish word in the poem, a dictionary word, and it arrives right after "reading" and "art." The reading has not disappeared, then. It has been put to work describing violence. The man's education supplies the vocabulary, and the gun supplies the only subject the two of them share.
What makes the poem significant is how much it leaves unsettled. It does not condemn the gunman or excuse him, and it does not say whether the gun's fear is a hope of rescue or a lie. It simply suggests that a person can be gentle, thoughtful and dangerous at once, and that violence has its own language which anyone can learn, however many books he has read. The poem is short enough to read in seconds, but that last line stays with the reader for much longer.