Five short lines carry a surprisingly tangled feeling. A speaker is getting high, and instead of simple pleasure he reports fear: the fear that he has "made myself / debtor to joy." Joy, normally something that simply happens to us, becomes a lender, and the high becomes a loan that will have to be repaid. The poem never says how, whether through the comedown, through guilt, or through some vaguer sense that happiness is never free. Its central idea is that pleasure and anxiety can arrive together, and that gratitude and dread can be hard to tell apart.
The title sets a trap. "Stoner" promises a comic figure, the slacker of countless jokes, but the voice inside the poem is careful, even scrupulous. The word also has older and rarer meanings. A stoner can be someone who throws stones, and the second stanza has something of that action in it, a small object released into a space that swallows it. That is an inference from the imagery rather than anything the poem states, but it fits the way the final lines work.
The syntax is a quiet piece of craft. "getting high I fear" has no comma, so the line can be read two ways: "getting high, I fear..." as a nervous aside, or "I fear / I have made myself" as a confession. The line break after "I have made myself" leaves the speaker briefly alone with his own responsibility. He did this to himself, and the sentence pauses long enough for us to feel it. Then "debtor to joy" lands as a short, weighted phrase, four syllables after two lines of five. The vocabulary here is financial, and it is oddly at home beside the mood of getting high. Debt is the opposite of drifting. It is a fact about the future, and the speaker cannot stop counting.
The second stanza turns on a simile that never quite finishes its job: "like some question I discharge / into the quiet." We are not told what is being compared to the question. It may be the fear itself, the whole first stanza, or the poem. The question is never stated either, and the casual "some" makes it sound half-formed, something the speaker could not quite put into words. "Discharge" is the cleverest word in the poem because it belongs to two worlds. To discharge a debt is to pay it off, and to discharge something is also to fire it, release it, let it go. So the same verb answers the first stanza's financial worry and gives the second stanza its physical motion. The question may be both the payment and the shot, though nothing in the poem confirms that anything has been settled.
Then comes "the quiet," a nicely bare ending. Using an adjective as a noun makes silence feel like a place, a pond or an open room, with nothing to throw back an echo. Nobody answers. The poem simply stops at the edge of that silence, which suits a thought that has no resolution.
The sound patterns are subtle. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so nothing marks where a thought ends and the next begins. But the long "i" sound runs through the poem like a thread: "high," "I," "I," "like," "I," and finally "quiet." Much of this is the first-person pronoun, and the sound carries the self through the poem until it dissolves in the last word. The line lengths shift in a way that feels natural rather than strict, with three lines of five syllables, one of four, and the long seven-syllable line, "like some question I discharge," which stretches out just as the question is let go.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. It takes a subject usually treated as a joke or a confession of vice and finds a more interesting worry inside it: that joy might be something we owe rather than something we are given. It also suggests, almost in passing, that asking such a question aloud, without expecting an answer, is itself a small act of faith. In a handful of words it leaves a reader with the odd feeling of having been happy and uneasy in the same breath.