The first line of Dave Bonta's «Theogony» sounds like thunder: "I am whoever I am." It echoes the answer God gives Moses in the Book of Exodus ("I am who I am"), a sentence that names no qualities and needs no approval. The title pushes in the same direction. "Theogony" comes from Greek and means roughly the birth of the gods, and it is also the name of Hesiod's ancient poem about their origins. So the poem promises a divine genealogy. What it delivers is a speaker trying to work out how a self gets made, and not quite managing to believe in the result.
The grandeur doesn't last. Line two nudges "whoever" into "however," and the sentence swerves: "I am however who / I should not be." The speaker is no longer self-sufficient. There is a standard of who they ought to be, and they fall short of it. The next stanza names the source of that standard with deadpan humour: "my management / which is one Word / tells me." "Management" turns the divine into a workplace, a supervisor handing down rules. Yet the capital W in "Word" keeps the sacred shadow alive, since in Christian tradition the Word is a name for God. Readers might also hear a modern joke in it, a faceless authority that speaks in single, unarguable pronouncements. The poem doesn't choose between these readings, and the comedy comes from holding the cosmic and the clerical in one phrase.
After that parenthesis the poem stops arguing and starts offering images. The next three stanzas have no verbs of being: "a candle that set / my wig aflame," "love like a door / on a summer day," "an almost kiss in the ear / seldom speaking." They read as answers to the question "who am I?", but they define the self by what it resembles or what has happened to it, not by what it is. The candle is the most vivid. A candle should be a gentle, enlightening light, but this one burns the wig. A wig is a disguise or a persona, so the fire suggests that insight, or passion, ruins the costume. The image is funny, with its slapstick of someone's hair going up in flames. It is also a small apocalypse for the false self.
The last two images are quieter and more elusive. A door on a summer day is likely to be open, propped wide to let air through, so love here seems to be an opening, an easy and unforced invitation. The "almost kiss in the ear" is a whisper, intimate and not quite physical. The words "seldom speaking" can describe the whisper itself, or the voice of love, or the speaker's own inner voice. That ambiguity matters. If the self speaks seldom, then the loud, confident "I am" of the opening may have been mostly bluster.
Structurally, the poem is free verse built from very short lines and stanzas of one, two or three lines. It has no end rhyme, and the music comes from repetition and echo: "I am" runs through the first two stanzas, and "whoever" and "however" chime with each other while meaning different things. The lines break at awkward, revealing moments. "a candle that set" hangs for a beat before "my wig aflame" arrives, which gives the line its comic timing. The isolated line "which is one Word" slows the reader down and lets the pun settle. The two parentheses, "(or so my management… tells me)" and "(I cannot believe / who I am)", act like brackets around the poem's whole run of images. The first presents authority as something the speaker only reports. The second is a private aside, almost a murmur.
That closing aside is where the poem turns. "Believe" is a word from the language of faith, and here it is the speaker who cannot believe in the speaker. The god of the opening line ends as a doubter of their own existence. This reversal gives the poem its significance. In a few lines, it takes one of the boldest statements of identity in religious literature and shows how the same words feel from inside an ordinary, self-questioning person. What it finds is not a settled identity but a bundle of small, odd, tender images, and the poem seems to suggest that this may be as close to a self as anyone gets.