Six short lines, no punctuation, and the poem has already built a whole late-night room that we never see and only hear. In Dave Bonta's "Blues singer," the speaker announces an odd workplace: "my office is in the ear." The job is listening. The clients arrive at midnight, in "any" voice, "oiled and drunk." The second stanza introduces the real star, "trouble," who sings, and who by the end has been given the only bed in the house. The central idea is that the blues is as much a way of listening as a way of singing. It is also a relationship, in which sorrow is a personality you live with, feed and make room for.
Start with "office." It is a flat, bureaucratic word, all desks and opening hours, set against drunkenness and heartbreak. Placing that office "in the ear" turns an organ into a workplace and listening into labor. The word also has an older meaning of duty or service, even a prayer said at fixed hours, and a midnight shift of attentive listening is not far from a vigil. That is a reading the text invites rather than states, but it fits the poem's mix of the humdrum and the almost sacred. The word "any" matters too. The listener doesn't choose clients, and whatever voice turns up gets heard.
"Oiled and drunk" is the first stanza's last line, and it carries a pleasing double meaning. "Oiled" is slang for drunk, so the two words nearly repeat each other, the way a drunk man does. But oil also lubricates machinery and smooths surfaces, so the phrase hints at a voice that runs easily, loosened and slippery. The vowel in "oiled" echoes the one in "voice" two lines earlier, which makes the line slide. Grammatically, the phrase could describe the voice, or the whole scene the speaker sits in.
Stanza two opens with a personification stated as plainly as a weather report: "trouble sings." There is no adjective and no fanfare, and trouble is simply a performer who has turned up. Then comes the stranger phrase, "a melancholy method." The two m-words give the line a hum, but the real surprise is "method," another businesslike term that echoes "office." The suggestion is that sadness, sung night after night, hardens into a technique. Trouble has a craft, just as the speaker has a job, and both seem to work the night shift.
The last line shifts from the public room to the private one: "and the one bed is for her." The definite article is telling. This is not a bed among several but the single bed, which suggests a small, poor, bare place with no spare room. "Her" turns trouble into a woman, and the line leaves open what she is to the speaker: a lover, a houseguest, or an old companion who simply outranks him. It also leaves open whether the speaker gives up the bed or whether the bed is trouble's territory anyway, the place where worry and insomnia do their best work. The tone is deadpan, like a house rule, and that dryness is where the humor comes from. It is a joke, and it also isn't one.
Formally, the poem is two tercets of free verse with no rhyme, no capital letters and no full stops. The lines are short, with two or three beats each, close to speech. The missing punctuation lets each phrase drift into the next like a song with no marked breaths. Each stanza ends on a small weight, "oiled and drunk" and "for her," which gives the poem two beats of finality. There is a faint sound-echo between the first line's "ear" and the last word, "her," as if the poem begins by taking something in and ends by handing something over. It isn't a true rhyme, but the shared *r* closes the circle. The poem also doesn't use the repeating-line pattern often associated with blues lyrics. It borrows the attitude instead: understatement, wry endurance, and sorrow treated as a household fact.
What makes the poem worth attention is its angle. The title promises a singer, yet the speaker sits on the listening side, and the only one actually described as singing is trouble. That leaves a pleasing puzzle about who the blues singer really is: the drunk voice, trouble herself, or the person whose ear keeps the office open. In six lines Bonta suggests that music like this needs somewhere to land, and that a listener's attention can be a form of hospitality, even when the guest is misery and gets the only bed.