Rain is normally something that happens to a person. In Dave Bonta's "Gothic" it moves in and becomes a flatmate. The opening couplet, "rain and I live together / in one lone body," fits a contradiction into a few words. Two tenants share the space, yet the body is still "lone." The speaker is accompanied and completely alone at once, and the company is weather: grey, damp and persistent. From there the poem sketches gothic as a mood felt from the inside, then steps back to look at it as a style.
The second couplet is a dare: "tell me how sober men cry / or go out in black." "Sober" works two ways, meaning both unintoxicated and solemn, and the speaker seems to doubt that either kind of man can grieve convincingly. The next image uses the line break cleverly. "Go out in black" ends one line and "coat like a hole" begins the next, so "black" first reads as a colour and then hardens into a coat. That coat is not merely dark but "a hole," an absence in the shape of a person walking down the street. Against this blankness come "hands in wild motion." Judging by the imagery, the figure is calm in outline and frantic in its gestures, as if the outside and inside no longer agree.
Then the tone shifts. "It is the fashion to fast / and play at death" is the speaker looking at the whole costume from outside. "Fashion" and "play" suggest pose and performance, a game with the heaviest subject there is. Fasting links hunger, ritual and style, and it prepares for the final couplet. The poem seems aware of how gothic might look to a sceptic, and it doesn't argue back. It names the pose and leaves the reader to decide how much of it is only pose.
The last couplet changes the question: "and I am too thin to think / of a burden like tomorrow." The sound of "thin" and "think" is almost a rhyme, and it ties body to mind. The thinness is physical, a result of fasting, but it is also a lack of strength. "Burden" turns the future into a weight, and tomorrow becomes something the speaker is too slight to lift. The phrase may faintly echo the old advice not to worry about tomorrow, but here it is not calm trust. It is exhaustion. The opening "and" makes the line sound like a consequence, so the playing at death begins to look less like play and more like a way of getting through one day.
The form supports this. There are five couplets, all lowercase and unpunctuated, with no rhyme. Without full stops the statements slide into each other, so "tell me how sober men cry" runs on into the coat and the hands with no pause to catch a breath. The lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, and only the final couplet stretches to seven each. The longest lines come where the burden is named, which gives the ending a slight heaviness. Sound does quiet work as well. The long "o" returns in "lone," "go," "coat," "hole," "motion" and "tomorrow," a hollow, moaning vowel that fits the poem's emptiness.
What makes "Gothic" worth reading is how much it does without the usual props. There are no castles, ravens or graveyards, only rain, a coat and a thin body. It treats gothic as a feeling, with the clothes and the fasting as its outward signs, and it is honest about both sides. The pose may be fashionable, yet the tiredness underneath is real enough to stop the speaker thinking past tonight. In ten short lines the poem lets a style and a sorrow occupy the same body, just as the rain does.