Most poems about disappointment dwell on the person who did the disappointing. Dave Bonta's "Disillusion" does something quieter. In six short lines it hardly describes the "people" at all. It stays with the speaker's effort to stop needing them, and it ends on an image that is hard to settle: a flag carried everywhere in order to be freed.
The opening lines are a puzzle of grammar. "how to let them contend / how to clear myself" are not sentences. They are infinitive phrases with no main verb, like notes a person writes to themselves, or questions muttered without a question mark. There is no punctuation anywhere in the poem and no capital letters, so the speaker's thoughts run on without the reassurance of full stops. The verb "contend" is nicely slippery. It can mean to struggle or compete, so "let them contend" may mean letting other people fight it out among themselves while the speaker steps aside. It can also mean to assert a claim, so the speaker may be giving up the argument. The poem doesn't choose.
"clear myself / from any expectation of people" is equally double-edged. To "clear" oneself can mean to be cleansed of blame, or simply to clear a space. Judging by the title, the expectation is probably the speaker's own hope in others, the illusion that is being lost. Yet "expectation of people" could also mean the demands people place on the speaker. Both readings fit the wish to be rid of other people's claims, whichever way they run. This line is also the longest in the poem, about ten syllables, and it sprawls with its Latinate "expectation," as if the thing being cleared away is heavy and clumsy.
Then comes the shortest, plainest line, set apart: "their promise left me raw." After the abstract vocabulary above, its words are nearly all small and Anglo-Saxon, and it lands like a flinch. "Promise" is a sharper word than "expectation." An expectation can be private, but a promise is spoken, and it implies someone else broke faith. "Raw" gives the wound a body. It suggests skin with the covering gone, and perhaps something unfinished, not yet cooked or hardened. The open vowel of "raw" also sounds a little like a cry. The poem never says what was promised or who failed to deliver, and the vagueness helps. The injury feels general, which makes it easy for any reader to recognize.
The last two lines turn on an odd piece of logic: "to free the flag in my hand / I carried it everywhere." The purpose comes first, the action second, and the action seems to work against the purpose. If you want to free a flag, you might expect to plant it or let it go. Instead the speaker carries it. One reading, which is an inference from the imagery, is that a flag only becomes a flag when wind catches it, so freeing it means walking with it into the open. A flag is also a loaded object, a sign of allegiance, of hope, or of surrender, and the poem won't say which. It might be the speaker's lost faith in people, now something to be released. It might be a new loyalty to oneself. The shift of tense matters too. The poem begins in the unanchored present of "how to" and ends in the settled past of "carried," as if the problem has been answered by action, though we never learn whether the flag actually flew.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines run from five to ten syllables, which suits a mind working something out and not performing a finished thought. There is only a faint echo between "contend" and "hand," whose shared ending draws the first and last stanzas together. The *f* and *fl* sounds in "free the flag" give the final image a little lift, and the soft, trailing "everywhere" makes the carrying feel long.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy bitterness. It admits being hurt, and it doesn't turn that hurt into a lecture on human failings. It treats disillusion as a practical problem, a matter of what to do with your hands afterward. The answer it offers is stubborn and a little strange, and that strangeness is why it stays in the mind.