A church is supposed to be full of voices, of people, of something larger than any one of them. Dave Bonta's "Charlatanity" begins by turning that expectation inside out: "how empty is the church / of the body." The small word "of" carries two meanings. The body may itself be the church, a temple now hollow, or the church may be empty *of* the body, with no flesh or physical presence left in its talk. The poem never chooses between them.
The title is a coinage. To my ear it folds "charlatan" into words like "Christianity" or "vanity", though that is an inference from the sound and the poem never says so. With a church in the first line, the hint of fraudulent faith is hard to miss. Yet the poem names no villain. The fraud is located in a single organ, the tongue.
The second stanza reads "further and further from the red / road of a ready tongue." The line break parts "red" from "road," so the colour hangs for a moment before it becomes a path. A tongue is red, and speech is a road that words travel out of the body. "Ready" is the sharpest word here. It suggests glibness, words prepared in advance, fluency that costs nothing. The grammar is also deliberately loose. Nobody is said to be moving "further and further," so the church, the body or the reader could be drifting. It could be a warning that smooth talk carries us away from what is real. It could equally be a hope of leaving that road behind. The poem allows both.
The last stanza, "to make every part presently dead / grow strange," is an infinitive with no main clause to lean on. It is a purpose with no stated agent, like a sentence that lost its beginning. "Presently" is ambiguous too. It can mean "right now," or "soon," which is an older sense of the word. The deadness is either already here or on its way. Then comes the surprise of "grow." Dead things should be still, but here they *grow*, and what they grow into is strangeness. The line points less to a corpse than to something like a limb that has gone numb and feels like it belongs to someone else. The tongue's fluency leaves the rest of the body estranged from itself.
The poem's few sound patterns support this. "Red" in the second stanza and "dead" in the third make the poem's only full rhyme, and the gap between them lets the colour of a living mouth drift towards death. Around that pair the short *e* sound keeps recurring in "ready," "presently" and "every," a quiet echo that links the glib tongue to the lifeless parts. "Further and further" is a simple repetition, and its stretched-out sound enacts the distance it describes.
The form is spare. There are three couplets, all lowercase, with no punctuation and no closing full stop. The lines are short and heavy with stressed single syllables ("how empty is the church"), and the second line of each couplet breaks off early, as in "of the body" and "grow strange." That makes the poem the opposite of what it criticises. A ready tongue would roll along in smooth, confident phrases, but this poem hesitates, breaks off mid-thought and ends on an open word instead of a verdict. Its halting manner is part of the argument, a way of speaking that tries not to be a performance.
That is where its significance lies. In about two dozen words, "Charlatanity" raises a question that reaches well beyond churches: what happens when talk about experience replaces experience itself? A sermon, a sales pitch or a confident essay can all fill the air while the body, which feels and tires and knows things without words, goes quiet. The poem trusts the reader to feel that loss rather than have it explained. For a student, it is a useful lesson in how much a poem can do with one ambiguous "of," one line break and one well-placed rhyme.