A married couple playing with puppets sounds like the most innocent of pastimes, and Dave Bonta's "Games" lets that innocence last for about two lines. By the third stanza the toys have started to look like a symptom. In nine short lines the poem sketches a marriage in which tenderness has slipped into performance, then closes on an image that shows the performance being quietly dismantled.
The opening is flat and domestic: "my wife and I play / with puppets." The line break does real work. "Play" sits alone at the end of the first line, so for a moment we read it as a plain, healthy verb, and only "with puppets" narrows it. A puppet speaks only when someone else moves it, so the image suggests partners talking through roles and borrowed voices instead of to each other. The poem never says whether the puppets are literal or figurative. The plural title nudges us toward the figurative, since "games" implies rules, strategies and sometimes a loser.
The second stanza is grammatically odd: "the more love begins / to grow stale." "The more" promises a pair, as in "the more we do this, the more that happens," but the sentence never delivers its first half. Read forward from the puppets, it says that the more they play, the staler love grows. Read the other way, staleness is what drives them to play. The poem doesn't choose, and the missing half is the point, because cause and effect tangle in a failing relationship just as they do here. "Stale" is also a well-chosen word. It belongs to old bread and shut-in air, to the kitchen rather than the tragic stage, and the slow phrase "begins to grow" makes the decline gradual and almost unnoticeable.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the poem uses lowercase and no punctuation, which gives it a deadpan, confiding voice. Still, small patterns show up. "Play" and "stale" share a long vowel, a faint echo that ties the game to its consequence. The first two stanzas each run five syllables and then three, a tidy symmetry, and the third stanza stretches to seven and five. The lines lengthen just as the strangest image arrives, as if it needed more room.
That image carries the poem: "I take from her mouth the lark / that pretends to sing." It reads like a conjuror pulling a bird or a scarf from a volunteer's mouth, and it also recalls ventriloquism, where whatever comes out of a mouth belongs to someone else. The lark is a traditional emblem of morning and joyful song, so a lark that only "pretends" is a pointed corruption of that tradition, love's music turned counterfeit. The p-sounds of "puppets" and "pretends" link the bird to the toys from the first stanza, so the lark becomes one more puppet.
The verb "take" is the most ambiguous word in the poem. Taking something from a mouth is intimate, almost a kiss, but it is also an extraction, a small violence. Is the speaker rescuing his wife from a false song or exposing her? And he is no bystander, since the poem opens with "I" and "my wife" playing together, so whatever pretense there is, he shares it. The poem also ends on "sing," the very thing the lark fails to do. He removes the fake song, but no real one replaces it, and what is left is the silence after the word.
What makes "Games" worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. Marriages in poems often end in a quarrel or a betrayal, and this one gives us neither. Its subject is the quieter process by which performance replaces feeling while both people carry on smiling. The poem is also honest about its own artifice, since a lark in a mouth is clearly an invention, a puppet of the poet's own making. It uses a pretending image to expose pretending, and it asks the reader to decide whether the speaker's final gesture is cruelty, honesty or a last act of love.