Most poems about guns are about the bang. Dave Bonta's "Secure" is about the moment before it, and the possibility that the moment can last. In eight short lines the speaker wishes to be sober, to stand up in a time of "plain necessity," and to be like a gun that has "never yet / shot off." The central idea is a paradox: real readiness may consist in restraint, and a weapon's best quality may be that it has not been used.
The opening, "o to be sober," is a wish, not a statement. The lowercase "o" sounds like a sigh, and the poem has no punctuation anywhere, so the longing runs on without the firmness a full stop would give. "Sober" is the first word worth slowing down for. It can mean not drunk, but it also means grave, clear-headed, unshowy. Since the poem never says what the speaker is or isn't drunk on, the word keeps both meanings. The second phrase, "stand up," is just as flexible: to rise to your feet, to take a stand, to be upright like a rifle against a wall. Nothing is fixed yet, which suits a speaker who is still only wishing.
The second couplet gives the occasion: "this time / of plain necessity." The poem never says which time, and we are given no date or circumstances, so the phrase stays open for any reader to fill with their own crisis. What it does tell us is the mood. "Plain" suggests that ornament, argument and excuses have fallen away and only the necessary thing is left. The language of the whole poem matches this. Almost every word is a single syllable, and the only longer words, "sober," "necessity" and "safety," are the abstract ones the rest of the poem leans on.
The simile arrives in the third couplet: "like my own true gun / my good piece of safety." The speaker doesn't want to hold the gun but to stand *like* it. "Own" and "true" make it personal and faithful, almost a companion, and "true" also carries the sense of straight, well aimed. Then comes the neat twist in "piece of safety." "Piece" is slang for a firearm, but here it is a piece *of safety*, as though the gun were a fragment of security rather than a threat. There is also a quiet pun, since a gun's "safety" is the catch that stops it firing. The title, "Secure," does the same double work. A gun can be secure in the sense of locked and made safe, and a person can feel secure because they are armed. The poem lets both meanings sit together without choosing between them.
Rhyme is absent, but the sound is carefully tuned. "Necessity" and "safety" are near-echoes, both ending in *-ty*, and they join the "plain" need of one couplet to the "good" safety of the next. The short *u* of "up" comes back in "gun," which is repeated in the last couplet, as if the word itself were being held steady. The long *o* sound threads through "o," "sober" and "own."
The ending is the most carefully handled part. "This gun never yet / shot off" is broken across the couplet so that "shot off" lands alone, and it is the poem's only forceful sound. "Shot off" is a blunt, almost clumsy phrase, and it brings to mind the idiom of shooting off one's mouth. If we read it that way, the sobriety the speaker wants is also a kind of verbal restraint, a refusal to blurt or boast. That is an inference from the idiom, not something the poem states. The word "yet" is just as important. It makes the gun's innocence temporary. The speaker isn't a pacifist, and the poem admits that the safety it praises could end.
What makes "Secure" worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It never preaches, and it neither glorifies the gun nor condemns it. It sets a tense, exact picture of strength that shows itself by staying unspent, and asks whether we can be like that: steady, plain-spoken, ready, and not yet fired.