Six short lines, three couplets, not a single punctuation mark: Dave Bonta's "Social medium" looks as light and frictionless as a status update, which is what makes it unsettling. The title is a pun. "Medium" can mean the platforms we post on, the spiritualist who lends her voice to speakers from elsewhere, or a size that is neither large nor small. The poem asks what happens to a self that has to be offered up through a channel.
The first couplet states the problem: "public as a door / my private self." The syntax is turned slightly inside out. It could be a statement (my private self is public as a door) or a wish (let my private self be made public as a door). The simile is odd enough to stop on. A door is not a window. It isn't for looking through but for walking through, and it is meant to protect what lies behind it. A self "public as a door" has had its boundary turned into a thoroughfare. The sounds reinforce this, since the hard *p* in "public" and "private" knocks the two opposites together like neighbours.
The second couplet gives a reason, or seems to: "because I would be / anything I might do." The line break matters. "I would be" stands alone for a moment as a bare wish to exist, and then the next line swerves into something conditional and performative. Identity is defined by actions, and not even by actions performed but by ones that are merely possible. The modal verbs "would" and "might" keep everything in the not-yet. Judging by the title, this is the logic of the online self, which is whatever it could be seen doing. A more generous reading is also available: the speaker is simply open to every possibility. The poem doesn't choose between the two, and the unpunctuated lines let both stay in play.
The final couplet is the strangest: "heaven be off / let me fit myself." "Heaven be off" sounds like a cousin of "heaven forbid," though here it reads as a dismissal, the way you might tell a nuisance to be off. If heaven stands for a final judge or a higher audience, the speaker sends it away and replaces it with a smaller request. "Let me fit myself" is almost a prayer, but it is addressed to no one in particular. The verb "fit" is rich. It can mean to tailor oneself to a space like a garment, to conform, or to adapt. The reflexive grammar is neat, because the self doing the fitting is also the self being fitted. And "self" in line two returns as "myself" in line six, closing a loop. The private self that was handed to the public ends up trimming itself to match its container, which is where the third sense of "medium" comes in.
The poem builds all this from very little. Its lines run four to six syllables, with two or three beats each, so it moves at the pace of a murmur or a held breath. There is no rhyme, only faint echoes: "door" and "do," and "self" and "myself." The repeated "be" ("I would be," "heaven be off") gives the poem a subjunctive, faintly liturgical tone, like a collect in a church service, and that tone rubs against the digital subject the title implies. The only capital letter in the body of the poem is the pronoun "I." Everything else is lowercase, as if typed into a box, so the ego stands up alone in a flat landscape.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves to the reader. It never says whether fitting yourself to a medium is a loss or a relief, and it doesn't lecture. It moves from exposure to motive to surrender in three steps, and the reader has to supply the missing verbs and links, much as we fill in each other's fragments online. In that sense the poem acts as a medium itself, passing a voice through a narrow form and showing how the form changes its shape.