Dave Bonta's "The book-lover's blues" is a short, wry confession about a person whose first love is reading. The speaker begins with two loose, almost proverb-like lines: chance makes a pleasant companion, but real needs are what we truly confide in. That suggests the speaker's deepest needs, the ones he trusts most, are not for people at all.
The middle couplet admits to shifting feelings. He loves sometimes, and sometimes he simply doesn't care. It sounds honest rather than cruel, as if he is describing his own moods without pretending to be steadier than he is.
The last lines land the joke and the sadness together. A woman is lovely, yet he suffers, and he asks God's forgiveness for his books. The poem implies that his devotion to reading gets in the way of closeness with someone else. The mood is light and self-mocking, but there is real guilt and loneliness underneath, like a blues song that smiles while it aches.