Four short lines, no punctuation, and a title that sounds like it belongs in an account book. Dave Bonta's "Ways and means" is about what a person becomes when there is almost nothing to live on. "Ways and means" is the language of budgets, of how you find the money and get by. The poem answers in the barest terms: you get by on coal and thin milk, and the cost shows up in the body.
The opening "o" is the sound of a sigh, the kind of cry that usually introduces a wish for something lovely. Here the wish is for something grim. Coal is fuel, not food. You burn it, you don't eat it. So "o to live on coal" could be a bitter joke, a grim vow of endurance, or a weary lament, and the poem never says which. That uncertainty is part of its pull. The phrase "live on" is also ordinary idiom, the same grammar as living on bread and water, so coal slips into the vocabulary of poverty as if it belonged there.
The next line, "and our own thin milk," is quieter and stranger. "Our" suggests a shared condition, a household or a community rather than one lonely speaker. "Own" suggests self-reliance with nothing coming from outside. Milk is the first food, so it carries a hint of nursing and care, but "thin" undoes the comfort: what is being given nourishes poorly. The pairing is striking. Coal is black, hard and mineral, while milk is white, liquid and bodily. The poem's whole economy fits between two opposites, and neither one sustains.
In the second couplet, "our" narrows to "my," and the focus moves from the shared table to a single body. The consequences arrive without verbs of feeling. The speaker doesn't say "I feel sick," only "foul weather in my belly." Weather is something that happens to you, that rolls in uninvited and can't be argued with, and putting it in the belly turns digestion into a storm. It is the natural result of a diet of coal. Then comes the poem's only explicit simile: "anger like a rot in my heart." Rot is slow, silent and organic, and it spreads. A reader might also notice that coal is itself the compressed remains of ancient decayed plants, and that milk, left alone, sours. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is eating what has already rotted and slowly rotting in turn. The heart, traditionally the seat of love, becomes the place where decay settles.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no full stop, so nothing clicks shut. The first couplet is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, five syllables a line, and "thin milk" puts two stresses side by side so the voice has to slow down. The long "o" sound runs through "o," "coal" and "own" like a low moan. The second couplet lengthens, seven syllables and then eight, as though the complaint were swelling. Liquid "l" sounds slide through "coal," "milk," "foul" and "belly," then give way to the short, hard "rot" and "heart." The poem ends on that last word with nothing after it, like a thought that cannot be finished or soothed.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. Hardship is usually described through facts and figures, but here it is described through what it does to the stomach and the heart. Bonta gives no setting, no named cause and no date, so the poem stays open. It could be about material poverty, a hint of industrial labor or cold hearths (though the text only suggests this), or emotional starvation, and a reader can hold all of these at once. It also refuses to console. It offers no lesson, no escape and no turn toward hope, only the plain statement that what you are fed is what you become. A poem this small can still ask a large question: when the means are meager, what happens to the ways we feel?