Four lines, no verbs and no full stops, and still Dave Bonta's "Gun lover" manages to describe a whole relationship. Everything depends on the title, which can be read two ways. A "gun lover" is a familiar phrase for someone devoted to firearms. Here it also suggests a lover who is a gun, or a gun that is loved. The poem never settles the question. Instead it lets the reader hear a kind of tenderness being applied to an object built to kill.
The structure is a repeated frame: "the ___ of a gun." Only two words change in each line, an adjective and a noun, and those two words carry all the meaning. Lovers' praise has long been built from lists of comparisons, such as "your eyes are...", "your lips are...". The poem borrows that habit, with an inventory of epithets, and the gun takes the beloved's place. The humour and the menace both come from how natural the borrowed form feels.
The four images, taken in order, move steadily closer to the body. The "certain clock" is something you watch or hear from a distance. Its ticking suggests a countdown, and "certain" works in two ways, as steady aim and as an outcome that cannot be avoided. The "fleet rose" brings in sight and perhaps scent. A rose is the standard symbol of romance, and "fleet" means both fast and fleeting. Judging by the imagery, the line might suggest a bloom of fire at the muzzle, or a wound opening, or simply the brief life of a beautiful thing. The "plain dish" is domestic and a little deflating. It is something set on a table and consumed, and "plain" makes the gun sound ordinary, even comforting. (Since "a dish" can also be slang for an attractive person, the word may be flirting a little too.) The last image, the "drunk kiss," is the most intimate. A kiss is contact, and "drunk" adds sloppiness, loss of control and bad judgment. The sequence goes from watching to smelling to eating to touching, and it ends at the point where there is no distance left.
The sound of the poem works in the same way. Lines two to four are each six syllables, and the first has seven. The adjective and noun in each line are both monosyllables and both stressed, so they land side by side: *fleet rose*, *plain dish*, *drunk kiss*. This gives the lines a clipped, hammered feel. There is no rhyme in the usual sense, but every line ends on the same word, "gun," which acts as an extreme form of rhyme. It comes down like a closing door each time, and the repetition suggests an obsession returning to the same thing. The white space between the lines helps too. Each image is isolated and has to be taken alone before the next one arrives.
There is also a small grammatical detail. Each quality gets "the," a definite article, as if we already know it well, while the gun itself gets "a," so it is any gun and not a particular one. The effect is that the intimacy seems familiar and the object seems interchangeable. The poem declines to say whose gun it is, who is holding it, or what it has done.
The poem never states what it thinks. It does not condemn, and it does not celebrate. It offers no violence, no victim and no explanation. The reader supplies those, and in doing so notices how easily the words of romance, domestic comfort and time-keeping fit around something deadly. The poem's real subject may be language itself: how affectionate, ordinary phrasing can make a gun seem familiar and even lovable. Because the poem is so short, that unease has no commentary to cushion it, and the final "gun" is the last thing the reader is left with.