"Liability" is a word from ledgers and courtrooms, and Dave Bonta pins it to the speaker's own head. In three short lines the mind becomes an item on a balance sheet, something owned that costs more than it earns. The word also hints at being "liable" to something, prone to it, and here the mind is prone to fear. The poem's claim is easy to state and harder to settle. The speaker would gladly be rid of a mind crowded with fears, except for one thing: "our mouth."
That small pronoun carries the poem. It begins with "my mind," private and sealed, then swings to "our mouth," and only then arrives at "I." The mind belongs to one person, but the mouth is shared. The poem never says who "our" includes, so any more specific answer, a lover or a companion, would be an inference from the text. What the word does show is that the mouth is where an inner life reaches someone else. It is the organ of speech, of eating and of kissing, though the poem names none of these. So the central idea seems to be that the mind is a burden, and what makes it worth keeping is not its contents but its connection to another person. The speaker never praises the mouth or calls it a comfort. It is simply the one thing standing in the way of throwing the mind out, and that grudging admission is more convincing than a declaration of love would be.
The construction is bare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. The lines lengthen from five syllables to six to nine, so the poem starts clipped and ends loosely, as if the speaker's thought runs on once it gets going. The first line has no verb. "My mind full of fears" is a snapshot or a label, the mind pictured as a container filled to the brim, and nothing in it moves. The movement comes with the middle line's "were it not for," an old-fashioned conditional that sounds almost formal after such plain words. Because there is no punctuation, the lines slide into each other. For a moment "fears / were it not for our mouth" can be heard as one tumbling phrase before the syntax settles. The reader has to sort out the sense, a small taste of the mental clutter the poem describes.
The sounds quietly support this. "Mind" and "I" share the same vowel, so the mind and the self are linked in sound even while the speaker wishes to detach one from the other. In the middle line, "our" and "mouth" share their vowel too, so the only shared thing in the poem is also the only place where two words echo each other closely. This may be coincidence, but it is a satisfying one.
The last line is built almost entirely from tiny, flat words: "I would be glad to be rid of it." "Glad" is the surprise. It is a light, cheerful word set against the heaviness of "fears," and it gives the poem a wry, deadpan tone. The speaker sounds less like someone in despair than like someone resignedly cataloguing a nuisance. Then there is "it." Most naturally it points back to the mind, but it is a dismissive little word, and it could stretch to cover the fears or the whole anxious predicament. The ambiguity leaves the gesture of throwing something away unfinished.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little room. It does not describe the fears or explain them, and it does not resolve anything. It sets one reluctant "but" against a whole mind of worry, and it suggests that what ties us to life may be a connection to someone else rather than any comfort within our own heads. Fear and attachment sit side by side in the poem without cancelling each other, which is how they often sit in life. A reader who sees that the "liability" is balanced by something shared has understood the poem's one real move.