A pair of dice, a dead man's pocket, a living hand: Dave Bonta's "Gambler's spell" packs a small ghost story into four short lines. The speaker has come into possession of dice taken from a corpse's clothing and now shakes them, and what the dice do in return is violent. They "write out like a dagger / all my red ink." The poem never says who the dead man was, or whether the speaker gambles by habit or has just stumbled into it. It trusts the objects to carry the meaning. The idea underneath seems to be that you cannot take a dead person's luck without taking their fate along with it, and that gambling is a way of writing your own ruin.
The poem is one unpunctuated sentence in lowercase, and its grammar is where the unease starts. The real subject is "dice," but it doesn't get its verb until the second stanza ("write out"). The speaker's own action, "which my hand now shake," is squeezed into a side clause. The speaker is not the agent here. The dice act, and the speaker's hand is just the thing that sets them going. The stanza break works like the moment the dice hang in the air before they land, and the verb that follows is the landing.
That clause also contains an oddity. The speaker's "hand" takes the plural verb "shake," not "shakes." It may be a deliberate roughness, or a slip. It can be read as a hand trembling as well as a hand rattling dice, and you can almost hear a second hand shaking alongside the speaker's, the dead man's. That is an inference, but the strange agreement lets the reading in.
The title's key word, "spell," carries several meanings at once. A spell is an incantation, which suits dice taken from a corpse. A spell is also a stretch of time, as in a run of good or bad luck. And to spell is to write letters out in order. That last meaning connects the title to the poem's one verb, "write." Dice are marked with pips, a crude alphabet of dots, and here they "write out" a result. The phrase also suggests writing out a cheque or a bill, which brings in money and debt.
"Red ink" then does a lot of work in two words. In accounting, red ink means loss, being "in the red." It is also the colour of blood, and the simile prepares for that. A dagger and a pen both have points, and both leave a mark on whatever they touch. The poem welds these together so that financial loss and a stab wound become one event. "All my red ink" is also total. The speaker is not slightly in debt but emptied out. One more resonance, which I'd offer only as a possibility, is that printers use a dagger symbol (†) to mark a death. Given the "dead man" in the first line, the word may carry that echo too.
The sound pattern supports the grim logic. "Dice," "dead" and "dagger" share a hard initial d, so that the three things the poem fears are tied together by sound before the reader notices. "Dice," "write" and "like" share the same long vowel, which makes the second stanza feel like an echo of the first. There is no rhyme, which suits a poem about chance, since a neat pairing of line endings would suggest an order the speaker doesn't have. The rhythm is uneven and speech-like. The opening line is a slow eight syllables, with "dead man's pocket" plodding along. The lines that follow are shorter, and the last is only four, ending on "ink," a short word with a hard stop, like a stamp on a document. The poem runs out of room just as the speaker runs out of whatever was being gambled.
What makes the poem worth attention is its economy. It gives no backstory, explanation or moral, only an object, a gesture and a consequence. Readers are left to supply the old folk fear that things taken from the dead are cursed, and the poem trusts that fear to do the rest. Its central image, the pen-dagger bleeding red ink, makes writing, money and violence the same act. In doing so, it makes the gambler's loss feel less like bad luck than like something already written.