Four short lines, almost no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Intemperate" is over before a reader has settled in, yet it leaves a faint taste of metal. The speaker compares his temper to a blade carried in the teeth, then admits, with a dry shrug, that it makes him unfit to take to bed. The poem seems to be about anger, but it is less about what anger does to other people than about what it is like to live with it, to carry it around and be unable to set it down when the lights go out.
The poem opens with the comparison and holds back the thing being compared. "like a blade carried in the teeth" comes first, so we see the knife before we know what it stands for. Only then does the second line name it: "my temper." There is no verb anywhere in this opening stanza. The poem never says that the temper *is* a blade. It just places the two side by side, the way the blade sits beside the tongue. The image is well chosen. People carry a blade in their teeth when their hands are busy, climbing or swimming, so the knife is something brought along for use. But the mouth is also where speech comes from and where the body is most exposed. Anyone carrying a blade there must speak carefully, and a flinch or a laugh could cut. Judging by the imagery, this anger is held in rather than flung out, and the first person at risk is the one holding it.
The title adds a layer of wordplay. "Intemperate" means lacking moderation, and it contains the word "temper," which the poem then gives us as its second line. "Temper" also has a metalworking sense: steel is tempered to bring it to the right balance of hardness. The title therefore hints that this blade has not been brought to balance. The poem never points this out, but the vocabulary of anger and the vocabulary of blades were already overlapping.
The second stanza drops from the dramatic image into everyday speech. "Not fit to go to bed with" sounds like a familiar domestic complaint, and the word "fit" quietly recalls a "fit of temper." Bed brings intimacy and rest into the picture, and a knife in the mouth belongs in neither. The line also ends on a dangling "with." Who is the speaker unfit to go to bed with? A partner? Himself? The poem leaves the object missing, as if the sentence itself were left unfinished. Then the last line turns the stakes: "if I hope to sleep." The danger is not only to someone else. It is to his own rest. After the threatening picture of the blade, this is almost comic, an anticlimax as modest as insomnia. The humor reads as self-defense, a way of admitting something uncomfortable without making a drama of it.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines shrink and swell in an uneven way. The first line is full of hard stops and heavy stresses, with *blade*, *carried* and *teeth* landing like a clenched jaw. The second line is only two syllables, a short, tight stop that pins the temper down. Stanza two is almost entirely one-syllable words, plain and conversational, as if the speaker had stopped performing and started talking. The final word, "sleep," is soft and drawn out, but it shares its long *ee* vowel with "teeth." The wish for sleep is therefore linked by sound to the blade in the mouth, and the thing he wants and the thing that prevents it end up in the same register. The lack of a closing full stop, along with the lowercase, leaves the poem open-ended, which suits a problem that does not resolve at nightfall.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. A familiar cliché, the sharp temper, is made physical and slightly alarming, then set against an ordinary night. The tone stays level throughout: no exclamation, no excuse, no blame. By giving the danger a concrete shape and then admitting what it costs him personally, the speaker shows that self-knowledge can be as sharp as the blade he describes.