Few poems say so much in so little room. Dave Bonta's "Charity case" runs to just six lines, yet it asks what we owe for being alive at all, and answers, oddly, that the only currency we have is the way we look at things.
Start with the title. A "charity case" lives on other people's generosity, and the phrase usually carries a faint sneer. The poem takes it literally and then widens it: the speaker has been given a place in the world without earning it. "I have been here by chance" admits there was no plan and no merit, only accident. The next line complicates that sense of newness: "I have been ancient and in the way." Chance and antiquity sit side by side, so the speaker is both a random arrival and something very old. One might picture a boulder in a stream, though the poem never says so. "In the way" is ordinary speech, what we say of an obstacle or of an elderly relative underfoot. It makes the speaker slightly comic and slightly sad, a nuisance who is tolerated.
The construction is simple and exact. The repeated "I have been" is a quiet anaphora, and the present perfect tense links past to present without saying where the story ends. The first stanza confesses; the second turns to a transaction, with the shift to "I pay." This is the poem's central surprise. We expect a charity case to receive, but this one pays. What for? "My river of nothing." The possessive matters, because even the emptiness belongs to the speaker. A river carrying nothing might suggest time passing with nothing in it. Rivers and payment together may also recall the old story of paying a ferryman to cross into the land of the dead, though that is an inference, since the poem offers no such name.
The next lines read like a ledger of non-reasons: "for any how / for no work." Splitting "anyhow" into two words turns a shrug into a small, unanswered question, as if "how" were hanging in the air. "For no work" returns to the idea of charity, where something is received without labor. The word "for" is repeated three times, and what follows it is all negation and vagueness: *nothing*, *any*, *no*. The vocabulary is one of absence, and the speaker pays into it anyway.
There is no rhyme here, and the poem is free verse, but the rhythm still does a lot of work. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly nine, nine, then four, three, four. The long lines in the first stanza and at the start of the second give way to a quick taper, as though a purse were being emptied coin by coin. The last line then lands on three stressed monosyllables in a row: "with one mad eye." Such a run of heavy beats forces the reader to slow down, so the poem ends with a thud rather than a flourish.
That final image is the richest. "Eye" is a homophone of the "I" that began so many lines, so the self shrinks, by the end, to an organ of seeing. "One" suggests something lopsided or partial, a single eye rather than a matched pair. "Mad" is pleasingly unstable: it can mean insane, or simply furious, and the poem lets both meanings stand. The speaker pays, then, with a wild, skewed, slightly unreasonable way of looking. Attention becomes the only thing worth handing over.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy feeling. It does not thank anyone for the gift of existence, and it does not complain about it either. It accepts being an accident, and an obstruction, and then insists on paying anyway, in a coin nobody asked for. Whether that payment is enough is left open. The poem is also a good lesson in how small words carry an argument. Here "for," "with," "no" and "any" do the heavy lifting, and nothing in the reading depends on knowing when or why it was written. The words on the page are enough, and they repay a second look.