Debts usually weigh on people; in Dave Bonta's "Debtor" they chew. The poem opens with a small shock of logic. The speaker has shed these debts, yet they "eat / one little bit of me." Shedding sounds like relief, like a snake leaving its skin or a coat slipping off the shoulders. Here the discarded thing turns round and feeds. The poem never says what the debts are, and that vagueness matters. They could be money, favours, guilt or broken promises. Judging by the second couplet, they lean toward the emotional, since what they demand is "an account / of my general fear." The central idea emerges in the last two lines. A poet's way of settling with his fears is to turn them into writing, and he does it with the only currency he has.
The poem's construction is spare. It has three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters, so it reads like a note jotted quickly rather than a polished statement. Most lines are short, five or six syllables, but the last, "change it into more useful letters," stretches to nine. The line grows at the moment of transformation, as though the act of making something finally gives the speaker room to breathe.
Grammar carries much of the drama. In the first two couplets the debts are in charge. They are the subject of "eat," and "they come for an account" makes them sound like collectors knocking at the door. The speaker is mostly an object: "of me," "my general fear." Only in the third couplet does "I" take control, and even then the syntax is skint. "And I a broke bard" has no verb at all, as if the speaker were too poor to afford an "am." The first verb he commands is "change," and it arrives in the final line.
The wordplay is where the poem is most inventive. "Account" means a ledger entry, but it also means a telling, a story, so the debts want both a payment and a confession. "General" is vague, a fear with no particular object, but it has a faint bookkeeping ring too. "Change" can mean to transform, but it also suggests coins, and it lands beside "broke," so the broke bard is paying in small change. "Letters" is the neatest turn. They are the letters of the alphabet, the raw material of poems, but the word also hints at correspondence and, by inference from the money language around it, financial paper. Fear is exchanged for something that can circulate. Even the sound work is thrifty. The b of "bit," "broke" and "bard" ties the speaker's smallness to his trade.
"One little bit of me" deserves a second look. The phrase is nursery-soft and almost cosy, yet it describes being eaten. The poem never raises its voice. Its horror is made small and polite, which makes it a little worse. In the same way the final claim, "more useful letters," is dryly funny. More useful than what? Than fear, certainly, which does nothing but gnaw. But the poet's self-mockery is also in the word. A broke bard is hardly in a position to say that poems are useful, and the line knows it.
The poem is significant because it packs a complete economy into six lines: a debt, a collector, an account and a payment. It also does what it describes. Reading it, we hold the finished transaction in our hands, because the poem itself is the fear changed into letters. Notice, too, that it ends on the exchange, not the receipt. We never learn whether the creditors are satisfied, or whether the next little bit of the speaker will still be eaten tomorrow. That open ending keeps the poem honest. It suggests that writing is a way of paying and a way of coping, but not a way of being free of the debt.