Desire usually arrives in poems with thunder: it burns, aches and consumes. In Dave Bonta's "Living in hope" it turns up more like a houseguest who stays ten minutes and leaves a few hairs on your coat. The speaker is "visited by desire", and what remains is "a little fur / on my heart and hat." The whole poem is six short lines with no punctuation, and it manages to be funny, tender and unsure of itself all at once.
The central idea seems to be that hope is made of small things. The title uses an everyday idiom, living in hope, meaning to get by on expectation rather than certainty. The word never appears in the poem itself. Instead we get a picture of what such a life looks like: a few modest wants, a bit of softness, and some trust placed in something outside the self.
The fur is the poem's strangest and best image. Fur is soft, warm and animal, and the verb "visited" fits it, because visitors leave traces. Judging by the imagery, desire here is less a flame than a creature that has brushed past, something like a cat that jumped onto a lap and left its shedding behind. The word "little" keeps the claim modest. The speaker is not consumed, only marked. Pairing "heart and hat" adds comedy, since the most private organ sits beside a piece of clothing, as if the heart were something you could put on and dust off. It also twists the old idea of wearing your heart on your sleeve. The repeated *h* in "heart and hat" makes the pairing sound deliberate, almost like a nursery rhyme.
There are no end rhymes, but the poem hums with a recurring *r* sound: "desire", "fur", "heart", "are", "cards". It is soft and slightly growling, which suits the fur. "Heart" in the first stanza and "cards" in the last also share a vowel, which quietly ties the two stanzas together without any obvious rhyme scheme. The lines run only four to six syllables, so the poem is spoken in short breaths. Much of the vocabulary is plain and monosyllabic, and "I have a little fur" sounds almost childlike. The lowercase, unpunctuated look adds to the murmured, conversational tone.
The second stanza is where the syntax gets interesting. "busy busy things / my desires are" flips the ordinary sentence "my desires are busy things", and the line break lets "busy busy things" stand alone for a moment before we learn what it describes. The doubled "busy" mimics the fussing it names, and "things" deflates the grand word "desires" into something closer to errands or chores. Where the first stanza made desire feel like a visitor, the second makes it a restless crowd of small tasks.
Then comes the pivot, "but so honest the cards." It uses the same inverted word order, but the verb "are" has been dropped, so the sentence hangs open and the poem stops without a full stop. The cards could be playing cards, tarot or the "cards on the table" of the idiom, and the poem doesn't choose. In every case a card is dealt, not invented, and it shows only what it shows. Against the busyness of the desires, the cards are plain and truthful. The word "so" sounds almost relieved. There is a second possible reading too, in which the honesty belongs to the desires as well, and the clipped grammar allows both.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It refuses the heightened language we expect from desire and finds a physical image, fur, that is unexpected but oddly right. It balances a light, joking surface against a real vulnerability, since someone who consults the cards is someone who doesn't know how things will turn out. The title gives the only horizon, and the unfinished final line leaves the speaker, and us, still waiting on the next card. That is what living in hope looks like here: not a promise of fulfilment, just a heart with a little fur on it and a hand still to be played.