The title arrives first, and it is a slippery one. "Stiff" can mean an erection, a corpse, or, as a verb, to cheat someone of what you owe them. Bonta never says which he means, and the eight short lines that follow seem to use all three. They are about a speaker who wants something intense from another person, wants it on terms that cost him as little as possible, and then catches himself at it.
The first couplet sets up a transaction: "I pay as much as any / for her deep eye." The word "pay" could be literal money or something subtler, like attention, devotion, or time. The poem never settles it, and that vagueness is part of its unease. "Eye" also sounds exactly like "I," so the line quietly suggests that what the speaker is buying is a place to put himself. "Deep" makes the eye a space to enter, not just something to look into.
The second couplet makes this explicit, and the line break does something clever. "But not to be known" ends on a word that the next line immediately echoes as "no." The speaker refuses knowledge, and the poem hears the refusal in its own rhythm. He wants depth without exposure. "No I am buried in it" is the poem's turning point: the speaker is not looking into the eye anymore but lying inside it. The missing punctuation lets "no" work as a correction to the previous line and as a flinch.
Burial also pulls the title toward its grim meaning. The third couplet follows it with a picture of the speaker "asleep with mouth open." This is the most defenseless image in the poem, a body slack and unguarded, which is close to the way a corpse looks. The question "then who will see me" has no question mark, so it hangs in the air as a worry more than a real inquiry. The logic is neat and a little cruel. If he is only buried in her eye and never known, nobody will see him. But sleeping beside someone is a kind of being seen, and perhaps the thing he has been avoiding is also the thing he lacks.
The last couplet turns the accusation inward: "am I the whore here / my desire full of convenience." Having started as the customer who pays, the speaker now wonders whether he is the one who sells out. Judging by the wording, the offence is not lust but convenience. His desire is easy, tidy, and free of obligation, and that makes it cheap. There is also a third possibility, that "stiff" is the speaker himself, the customer who pays everything except the one thing that would count.
The form supports all this. The poem is four unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I," which is the only thing the poem lets stand tall. The lines are short and mostly plain one- and two-syllable words, until the last line stretches to "my desire full of convenience." The long, soft-edged word "convenience" lands like a verdict, and it is the poem's only real polysyllable. The sound patterns are quiet but audible: "deep" and "asleep" chime across the stanzas, and "known" and "no" fold into each other. The lack of full stops means thoughts bleed into one another, and the speaker never gets a clean sentence in which to defend himself.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it flatters its speaker. Poems about desire often make it noble or tragic. This one watches desire hedge its bets. The speaker wants to be swallowed, not seen, and then recognises that this wish is a kind of dishonesty. Nothing in the text says who "her" is or what kind of exchange is happening, and the poem is stronger for leaving that open. A reader can take the "whore" line literally or as a harsh metaphor for any relationship that is more comfortable than true. Either way, the poem leaves an uncomfortable question: can you ask to be held by someone's gaze while refusing to be looked at? In eight lines, Bonta suggests the answer might be no, and that the speaker already knows it.