Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Shit talker" speaks a line of dialogue, yet the page is full of noise. The poem opens with a question, "how is a foul mouth to be remedied", and the missing question mark is the first clue to its tone. The speaker isn't really asking. The phrasing sounds almost clinical, as if bad language were a condition to be treated, but the weariness underneath is plain. The poem then drops the question without answering it, and what replaces the answer is its most interesting move.
The first stanza is about scale. The foul mouth is "fit for every war and after- / dinner blow-up," and the two occasions sit side by side as if they were equals. A battlefield and a dinner table become the same stage for the same performer. "Fit" is a nicely loaded word. It means suited to, but it also hints at a fit of temper, so the mouth is both well equipped for conflict and prone to tantrums. "Blow-up" works the same way, since it can be an explosion or just a row over coffee. The line break splits "after-dinner" in two, so the reader trips over the hyphen and lands on "dinner" just as the talk turns ugly. The stanza also shrinks as it goes, from a long first line to a stubby "dinner blow-up," like something going off and then fizzling out.
The second stanza turns from the ear to the eye. "Out with his absent truth" can be read in more than one way. It might be a curt dismissal, as in "out with him." It might be a demand to drag something into the open. The phrase "absent truth" is pleasingly contradictory, because you cannot bring out what isn't there. The speaker seems to be saying that the talker's speech is full of noise and empty of fact. The word "his" makes the absence a kind of possession, as though the man carries his missing truth around like a coat.
Then comes the poem's one real picture: "his white fish-belly / big as a blemish on the night." The poem never says what this belly is. Judging by the imagery, it could be the pale underside of a body, a wide-open mouth glimpsed in the dark, or a moon that has turned from a symbol of beauty into a stain. Whichever you choose, the effect is similar. A fish-belly is soft, pale and a little sickly, the side of a creature that is normally hidden and, once exposed, usually means something has died. By calling it a "blemish," the speaker treats the night itself as skin, a clean surface now marked by something that doesn't belong. The stanza grows as it goes, from two six-syllable lines to an eight-syllable one that stretches across the dark. Where the first stanza dwindles, this one swells.
The sound work supports the contempt. The first stanza is full of f sounds ("foul," "fit," "for") that you can feel in your lips and teeth, and they return in "fish." The last line piles up plosive b's in "big," "belly" and "blemish." Saying them aloud means spitting and puffing slightly, so the lines nearly act out what they describe. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, only lowercase lines and two tercets, so nothing tidies the mess up. The poem has no formal order, which suits a subject that is unruly in its own way.
The poem's significance lies in how little it needs to turn an irritation into something memorable. Notice that the crude word of the title never appears in the body, where the speaker settles for the more formal "foul." The ugliness is quarantined in the title, and the poem itself stays controlled. It answers the question not with advice or a lecture but by showing the talker as a pale, swollen shape on the dark. That is a harsher verdict than any argument, and it leaves you wondering whether the problem has been solved or only shamed into silence.