Twenty-three words, and only two of them: that is everything Dave Bonta gives us in "Losing strategy." There is no enemy, no battlefield, no named speaker, just the oldest choice a frightened creature faces, stripped of everything except the choice itself. The familiar phrase is "fight or flight," but the poem swaps the noun for a verb, so "flee" stands beside "fight" as an equal. Both are now actions, both are orders, and the poem reads like a mind shouting commands at itself and changing its mind mid-breath.
The structure carries the argument. Across three stanzas, the balance between the words slowly tips. The first stanza is almost pure retreat: seven "flee"s and one "fight" tucked in as the second word, like a brave thought that vanishes as soon as it appears. In the second stanza "fight" comes back three times, and the first is capitalised: "FIGHT." It is the only capital letter in the poem, its one raised voice, and the very next word is "flee." By the last stanza, "fight" leads five to two. Read quickly, the poem seems to trace courage growing. The title won't let us settle into that comfort, though. Whatever is happening here, it is losing.
Part of the reason is that nothing here behaves like a strategy. A strategy is a plan held steady, and this is a flicker, a sequence that could have come from flipping a coin. Running halfway and then turning to fight, then running again, wastes the advantages of both. The poem even shows this in its line lengths. "Flee" gets a whole line to itself, "flee flee flee flee," a flat-out sprint. "Fight" never manages one. Its longest run is the three that open the final stanza, and then "flee" cuts in. Even at its most defiant, the poem cannot sustain a full line of defiance.
The ending adds to the unease. The last line, "fight flee fight," has three words where the established pattern leads us to expect four, so the poem stops one beat short, on "fight," with no punctuation to close it. That could be the moment of decisive courage, or it could be a speaker cut off mid-sentence. Either way, the outcome is withheld. A poem called "Losing strategy" never shows us the loss, and the reader has to imagine it.
Sound and rhythm do much of the emotional work. Every word is a single stressed syllable, so the poem moves like footsteps or a pounding pulse, and with no punctuation there is nowhere to breathe. The two words feel different in the mouth. "Flee" has a long, open vowel that can be stretched into a gasp or a cry, while "fight" shuts on a hard *t*, as clipped as a slammed door. They also begin with the same letter and look alike on the page, so the eye slides between them, which quietly suggests how close the two choices become under panic. There is no rhyme in the traditional sense, but with only two words in play every line echoes every other. Repetition does the binding that rhyme normally would, and the poem becomes part chant, part stutter.
There is no imagery in the usual sense either, and that absence is meaningful. Fear narrows the world to its smallest options, so the poem narrows with it. What we get instead is typographic: the lone capitals, the short final line, the shape of the words on the page. The reader supplies the picture. It might be a person at a crossroads, an argument going wrong, an anxiety attack, or a group deciding whether to resist. Nothing in the text fixes the situation, which lets the poem fit all of these.
The poem's significance lies in how much it compresses into so little. It treats fight-or-flight as something repeated and renegotiated moment by moment, rather than a single reflex. Its quiet claim is that indecision is itself a decision, and often the worst one. It is also a little funny. The dry, businesslike title sits on top of what is plainly flailing, and the humour fades as we recognise ourselves in it.