Edward Lear's owl and pussycat sail away in a pea-green boat, marry, and dance by the light of the moon. Dave Bonta's "Owl and pussycat redux" brings that sweet couple back as adults, and the word "redux" turns out to be a warning. The cradle-song romance returns with its teeth showing. Its central idea is that love and appetite are hard to tell apart, and that passion between two people can be a form of mutual destruction.
The opening already works against comfort. The poem begins in lowercase with a relative pronoun, "who as a couple kill / one another out of love", as though we have walked into the middle of someone's sentence. Nothing tells us who "who" refers to. Only afterwards do we get candidates: "I and my wife / or my bookseller and me". The speaker puts himself among the lethal couples, which is both funny and unnerving. The little "or" is the most intriguing word in the poem. It offers two partnerships and doesn't choose. Judging by the text, the speaker might be hesitating, joking, or confessing, and the poem refuses to say which. The grammar slips too. "I and my wife" is stiff and formal, while "my bookseller and me" is looser and more intimate, so the tone relaxes just as the relationship becomes harder to define. A bookseller also suits an owl, the traditional emblem of wisdom and reading.
That makes the third couplet cut deeper: "we must be ruined / minding nothing but lust". "Ruined" can mean morally or socially disgraced, but it also suggests a crumbling building, a love that has collapsed into rubble. "Minding" is a good pun. To mind something is to care about it, but the word also contains "mind". If the couple mind nothing but lust, then the owl's wisdom has been switched off. "Must be" adds a touch of doubt, as if the speaker is inferring his own ruin from the evidence, like a bystander at his own accident. Sound ties the lines together: "must" and "lust" nearly rhyme, and the poem's first and last abstract nouns, "love" and "lust", share an initial L. The poem slides from one to the other in a few lines.
The form is bare free verse. There is no rhyme, which matters because Lear's poem is all singsong and jingle, and no punctuation of any kind, not even a capital for "I". Lines are short, mostly two to five words, and the stanzas are mostly couplets. That keeps the pace quick and nervous, like someone talking before they can think better of it.
The ending is where the structure does its most interesting work. A single line, "we who", stands alone, and the phrase simply stops. It repeats the poem's opening grammar and then breaks off, as if the speaker cannot finish the confession or has been interrupted by his own desire. When the poem resumes with "we who enchant / playing owls", it doesn't complete the earlier thought but starts a new one. "Enchant" is used without an object. Who is enchanted? The partner, the reader, no one? The verb also carries a faint echo of singing, which links back to Lear's owl serenading under the stars. "Playing owls" is just as double-edged. It suggests pretending, a game or a theatrical role, and also hunting, since owls are predators. The couple play at being wise, charming creatures while behaving like killers. The phrase leaves open whether the violence is literal or the kind lovers mean when they say a night "killed" them. The poem has no final full stop to settle it.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. In about twenty words it takes a beloved nursery poem, strips away the rhyme and the moonlit innocence, and uses what remains to ask an adult question: what happens to the fairy-tale marriage once desire, jealousy and self-deception are admitted? Its humour is dark, and it implicates the speaker rather than pointing at other people. The broken sentences make the case too. Love in this poem doesn't resolve neatly, and the poem stops mid-thought, as the couple's story seems to.