A strike is supposed to be something people do on purpose, with a grievance and a plan. Dave Bonta's "Strike" borrows that dignity for something far less organised: a body that is wearing out. Its parts are treated as a workforce, each walking off the job with its own complaint, and the poem's central idea is that decline can be read as protest. The failing eye, heart, ear and hips stop being symptoms and become voices. The last line then asks who put them up to it.
The opening line, "we go out on strike", sets the tone with its plain, almost cheerful announcement. The "we" is slippery. It could be the body parts speaking together, or the speaker standing in solidarity with his own organs. The ambiguity matters, because in a strike there is no clear line between the one who leads and the ones who follow.
The five lines after it work like a list of grievances, and most of them have no verb. They only name and describe, as if the union had pinned its demands to a door. The imagery is a mix of the mechanical and the musical. The left eye is "as poor as a cog", a simile that is slightly off, since a cog isn't usually poor. That is where its force lies. A cog is small, replaceable and overlooked, the humblest part of a machine, so "poor" suggests failing sight and low status together. It is also hard not to hear a political pun in "left eye", which prepares the ground for the "faction" at the end.
The heart is "forced to sing an impossible part", and here the poem turns from factory to choir. "Forced" suggests conscripted labour, while "part" works twice, as a voice part in a score and as a body part. The heart is both an organ and a singer handed music it cannot manage. The line is also the longest, and the four-syllable "impossible" stretches it out, so the line itself seems to strain.
The ear, "a well for the mad", is the most open image. A well takes things in and holds them in the dark. The ear might be a deep place where other people's ravings fall, or the speaker's own tinnitus-like noises. "Mad" also means angry, which suits a picket line. Then comes the shortest line, "the no-good hips", which sounds like a gruff aside from the back of the crowd. The slangy, dismissive compound gives the poem a human, grumbling voice. Hips carry and turn the body, so their going on strike means a literal stopping.
The poem rhymes nowhere, and without punctuation or capitals it reads as one low, continuous murmur. But it has sound patterns. The long *i* of "strike", "eye" and "mind" ties the beginning, middle and end together, and "mad", "hips" and "lit" add short, clipped notes. The line lengths do some of the work as well. The first line is brisk at five syllables, the heart line sprawls to ten, and the hips line shrinks to four. The rhythm speeds up, drags and cuts off, much as a failing body does.
The final line stands apart after a blank space: "what faction lit up the mind". It has no question mark, so it hovers between a real question and a sigh. "Faction" implies a splinter group, a party within the party, and so a body politic with internal quarrels. "Lit up" can mean illuminated, set on fire, or fired like neurons, and each reading gives a different answer to who started this. The mind may be the troublemaker that stirred up the rebellion, or the manager who has just discovered that the workers have stopped. It may be both, with the speaker as victim and suspect at once.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. In six lines, it turns the tired comparison of the body as a machine into a labour dispute, with humour, sadness and a hint of respect. Bodies are usually described as betraying us when they fail. Here they are given reasons. The last line leaves the reader with the thought that the mind, which feels like the boss, may be only another faction in a body with many demands.