Anyone who has settled an argument with a fist and a flat palm knows the rule: paper covers stone. So when the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Roshambo" reports that "stone got / the better of paper," something is off. The title is another name for rock-paper-scissors, a game where outcomes are meant to be fixed and fair. Here the result runs against the rules, and the poem moves straight on to an unexplained appetite for "six / bottles of wine." Either the game was played loosely, or it was never really a game of hands.
The poem hangs on one small word, "as." It doesn't say *because* or *after*, only that the two things happen side by side. That leaves the reader to decide whether the wine is a prize, a consolation, or something the speaker was going to do anyway, with the game as a pretext. The text doesn't settle this, and the lack of an answer is where the poem's mood comes from. I'd suggest the speaker is dressing up a decision as fate: the game "decided" it, so the bottles are no one's fault.
The verb "oblige" supports this reading. It belongs to hosts and good manners, to doing someone a favour. Applied to oneself, it turns solitary indulgence into a courtesy, as if the speaker were both host and guest at a very small party. The grand phrasing sits comically beside the amount: six bottles is not a polite quantity. The word "myself" also hints that no one else is present, which suggests the contest may have been played alone, or against someone who has left the poem entirely. That is an inference from the text, but the isolation feels deliberate.
The two nouns can also be read beyond the game. Paper is what poems are written on, fragile and easily folded, while stone suggests weight, permanence, even a gravestone. If the page loses to the stone, a gentler thing has lost to a harder one, and the wine looks like a response to that. The word "stone" also sits close to "stoned," an old slang term for drunk. The poem never says so, but with wine arriving two lines later the echo is hard to unhear. Choosing "stone" over the more familiar "rock" gives the word that extra shade.
The construction is spare. There are two couplets, no capital letters, no punctuation, and no rhyme. Without a full stop, the poem doesn't close; it simply stops, as though the evening goes on after the last word. The rhythm is carefully uneven. "stone got" is two heavy beats, blunt as a dropped pebble, and the line break leaves the verb hanging. The next line relaxes into the near-proverbial "the better of paper," which flows easily because the idiom is so familiar. In the second couplet the break between "six" and "bottles" holds the number in suspense for a moment before the plain answer arrives. The pause works like a comic timing device.
Sound does quiet work too. "Better," "paper," and "bottles" all lean on the clicking consonants b, p and t, so the first and last images feel linked, as if game and drink were part of one gesture. The vocabulary is also mostly everyday, with only "oblige" standing out, which makes it the line the reader remembers.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little. In about fifteen words it gives a scene, a character, and a joke with a sadder note underneath. It never explains the reversed rule, the missing opponent, or the six bottles, and it trusts the reader to supply them. A winner is declared and a drink is poured, yet the poem never makes clear who has actually won.