Change one letter and "unsafe sex" becomes "unsafe lex." In Dave Bonta's poem, the swap does a lot of work. "Lex" echoes lexicon, the stock of words, and it is also the Latin word for law. The title sets up the poem's joke and its argument: words can be as risky as bodies, and a poem can pass something on, like an infection.
The first stanza builds that idea in three short lines. "Mouth to mouth" could be a kiss, or resuscitation, or the way poems have always travelled, spoken from one person to another. Each reading puts the poem inside the body. The casual "some unsafe poem" suggests a poem picked up at random, with no warning label, and the verdict is blunt: "made me sick." Counting syllables, the lines run roughly three, five, three. The longer middle line is hemmed in by two short ones, so the sickness arrives with almost no room to prepare.
The second stanza turns from infection to examination, and the imagery gets darker. "A heart examination" sounds medical, but it is carried out "by a hangman," an executioner with a doctor's job. The stanza is held together by sound: heart, hangman, hand all begin with the same breathy *h*, so the three words seem to lean on one another. The "bad hand" is ambiguous. It might mean a clumsy or injured hand, which would make the examination rougher and the speaker's discomfort greater. It might also hint at a poor hand of cards, or at bad handwriting. The poem doesn't settle this, but the likeliest sense is that the poem handles the speaker's heart badly and the speaker still submits. The stanza can also be read as self-examination, in which the speaker is both patient and condemned.
The final stanza explains why any of this matters. "My soul grown fat on the arts" is the confession that changes the poem. The danger comes from the speaker's own comfort, a soul fed on culture until it has gone soft and well-fed. The plural "the arts" has a slightly institutional sound, like galleries and subscriptions. Fatness is a slow, pleasant condition, while sickness is sudden and unwelcome, and the poem sets the two against each other. The last two lines work like a prescription: "it did me good / to be vexed." This is the logic of bitter medicine, but the word choice is funny. After "sick" and "hangman," the speaker is only "vexed," an old-fashioned, mild word that deflates the drama. It reads as self-mockery. The speaker seems to admit that his comfort is so deep that mere annoyance feels like a gift.
The form supports this plain, wry tone. There are three tercets with no rhyme, no capital letters and almost no punctuation, so the line breaks do the pacing. The poem is not entirely free of sound patterning, though. "Sick" in the first stanza and "vexed" in the last both end on a hard, clipped *k* sound, so the poem begins and ends with a physical complaint and the cure ends up sounding like the illness. In the second and third stanzas, the longer first line carries the diagnosis and the short lines deliver the sting. The last line, "to be vexed," is the shortest in the poem and closes it quickly.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does what it recommends. In a few lines it offers a small theory of art: poems should be able to make us ill, to examine us roughly, and to unsettle a self-satisfied reader. It also delivers this theory with humour and without lecturing. Its attitude toward its own subject is a little reckless, and the title's pun is a bit rude. That is fitting for a poem that argues for risk, and it leaves a useful question for readers: when did a poem last bother you enough to do you good?