"Reformed" is a word we use for smokers, gamblers and sinners. It implies that something was wrong and has been fixed. Dave Bonta puts it in front of "loner" and lets the title hint at a success story, a person cured of solitude. The five short lines that follow undo that hint. The speaker has become sociable, has acquired "things to talk about", and what he feels is not relief but loss: "I miss myself."
That first line is the poem's hinge. Most of us miss other people, or places, or past times. Here the speaker misses a person who is himself, as if the earlier self were someone he has left behind and could visit only in memory. The next line adds to the strangeness. "Alone" sits at the start of line two, so it can attach backward ("I miss myself alone") or forward ("alone before I had / things to talk about"). Both readings work. He misses himself *when* he was alone, and he misses himself *in* aloneness, as if the state were a place he once lived. The line break after "had" also makes the verb of possession hang for a moment, and what follows is oddly vague: "things to talk about." The poem doesn't say whether these things are friendships, opinions, experiences or responsibilities. The vagueness seems deliberate. Having things to talk about is presented almost as an accumulation, like clutter, and once it arrives the speaker can't go back to the blank, quiet state before it.
The second stanza turns from statement to image: "making trouble with bells / in place of hands." There is no verb of its own and no punctuation, so it reads most naturally as a continuation of the first sentence. What the speaker misses is the self who was *making trouble with bells*. The picture is surreal, and the poem gives no explanation. Judging by the imagery, though, a few things stand out. Bells make noise without making language, so the earlier self was not silent, only wordless. Bells also announce, summon and disturb, so "trouble" suits them. And "in place of hands" suggests a body slightly altered, perhaps a jester's or a child's, where the tools for grasping and holding have been swapped for tools for ringing. The old loner seems playful and a little unruly, communicating in clangs rather than conversation.
That reading connects back to the title. If "reformed" means cured of troublemaking, then to reform is to learn to talk sensibly, to stop ringing and start explaining. The poem quietly suggests that something joyful was lost in the exchange. Talk is useful, but it may be tamer than the private, noisy mischief that came before it.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation, and the only capital is the pronoun "I." The lines are short and fairly even: roughly four, five and five syllables in the first stanza, then six and four in the second. The brevity echoes the subject. The poem itself has very few "things to talk about" and says them plainly, then stops. Its sounds are soft and quietly linked: the sibilance of "miss," "myself," "things" and "bells," and the repeated *l* and *b* sounds in "alone," "before," "bells." The effect is hushed, close to a murmured confession. The jump from the abstract first stanza to the odd, physical picture of bells for hands is the poem's one real surprise, and it lands because everything before it was so spare.
The poem's significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. It doesn't argue that solitude is better than company, and it doesn't pretend the speaker wants to undo his change. It only admits that growth can feel like subtraction, and that becoming a person with plenty to say may cost us an earlier, stranger self who needed no words at all. Anyone who has felt more articulate and less free at the same time will recognize that feeling, and the image of bells where hands should be gives it a shape that is hard to forget.