Five lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Affliction" looks too small to hold what its title promises. Instead of a catalogue of suffering, it gives a quiet social awkwardness. The speaker's body has become something like a guest who hovers in doorways, and the speaker realises how little they ever knew it. The poem never says what the affliction is. The "vexed ear" at the end might point toward hearing, but that is only a guess. The poem stays general, and that helps it.
The first stanza sets up the problem in plain, mostly one-syllable words. "A body grown cautious" is an odd diagnosis, because caution is usually a virtue. Here it reads as a symptom: the body has learned to hold back, flinch, hedge. The verb "grown" suggests a slow process rather than a sudden blow. Then comes "comes to be in the way," an everyday idiom for being an obstacle. It also means something more literal, a body that physically blocks the path. The phrase is almost apologetic in tone, as if the speaker were describing someone else's inconvenient relative. That detachment shows in the grammar too. The poem says "a body," not "my body," and the first person does not appear until the last line.
The second stanza is built from two participial phrases, "having given nothing" and "having been but an acquaintance," and with no punctuation to anchor them, it is hard to say who they describe. Perhaps the body has given nothing: no warning, no sign before it began to fail. Perhaps the speaker has given nothing, no attention or care, to a body that was simply expected to work. Both readings hold at once, and each makes the other sadder. If the speaker ignored the body, its caution begins to look like a reasonable response. The repeated "having" works like a ledger, listing what was never paid or received.
"Acquaintance" is the most telling word. It belongs to the vocabulary of manners, the person whose name you know but whose life you don't. It is a cool, slightly comic word to apply to the one thing we might expect to know best. The poem suggests that we usually meet our bodies the way we meet acquaintances, briefly and without curiosity, until the relationship is forced on us.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no regular meter and no obvious rhyme scheme, but the lines shrink and swell with purpose. "Comes to be in the way" runs smoothly, almost like a proverb. "Having given nothing" falls through its syllables like a dropped weight. The longest line, "having been but an acquaintance," drags on its four-syllable noun, and the poem's last line is its shortest. In "to my own vexed ear," the stressed words "vexed" and "ear" sit side by side, so the poem ends heavily, like a door closing. There is also one quiet rhyme that is easy to miss: "grown" in the first line returns as "own" in the last. The two words frame the poem and gently contrast the body that has "grown" away with what is supposedly "my own."
The choice of "ear" matters as well. The ear is the organ of attention, and to be only an acquaintance "to my own vexed ear" suggests the body was heard only in passing. "Vexed" may mean irritated, troubled, or both. It implies that the body now speaks in complaints the ear would rather not hear.
What makes the poem significant is how little it asks of its reader and how much it hands back. It avoids melodrama and moves illness out of the language of medicine and into the language of relationships, where the failure is one of introduction rather than treatment. Because the affliction is never named, almost any reader can fill it in with an ache, an age, or a loss. Its lines are brief enough to reread several times, and each reading changes whom the body is cautious of.