"Cussedness" is a comic, old-fashioned word. It means stubborn contrariness, a readiness to do the awkward thing just because it is awkward, and it seems to carry "cuss" inside it, the casual cousin of "curse". Dave Bonta's title promises bad behavior, and the eight short lines that follow deliver something stranger and warmer than a complaint: a small portrait of a marriage in which noise, anger and affection are hard to tell apart.
The first stanza states its paradox plainly: "the joy of an oath / in private discourse." Nobody expects joy from swearing, yet that is the poem's claim. "Oath" is a clever choice because it works two ways. It can be a swear word, the kind that slips out when you stub a toe, but it is also a solemn promise, the kind sworn in a church or a courtroom. The second stanza introduces "my wife," so a faint echo of marriage vows hovers behind the word, though the poem never says so. Then there is "discourse," a stiff, scholarly word that sits oddly beside a curse. Calling a string of expletives "discourse" is a joke, and the mock-formality makes the swearing sound almost civilized. "Private" tells us this is not public rudeness. It is a language shared behind closed doors, and the reader is allowed to overhear it.
The second stanza turns from abstraction to a picture: "new chimneys falling / between my wife and me." The poem gives no explanation, so the image has to be read rather than decoded. Chimneys are tall, upright and meant to last, and they are associated with the hearth and the warmth of a home. These ones are *new*, which suggests freshly built and not yet settled, and they are *falling*. The word "between" matters as well, because the chimneys fall into the space separating two people. That could be a quarrel, bricks and soot crashing down in a row. It could just as easily be something lighter, a comic collapse that leaves the pair standing and laughing in the dust. The phrase "falling between" also brushes against ordinary idiom, the way a gap opens between two people. The poem leaves it open, and that openness is part of its charm.
The construction is spare. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem seems to be spoken casually. More unusually, it has no main verb at all. The first stanza is a noun phrase, and the second hangs on the participle "falling," which never lands in a finished sentence. The effect is a snapshot, a moment held in mid-collapse, with the joy never quite settling into past or present. There is no rhyme, but the sound is carefully managed. Three lines run to five syllables ("the joy of an oath," "in private discourse," "new chimneys falling"), and the last stretches to six, as though the line itself has to cover the distance "between my wife and me." The long *e* sounds of "chimneys," "between" and "me" close the poem with an open, almost sighing note, while "joy" and "oath" share a rounded vowel that makes the first line sound like the satisfied noise it describes. The break between stanzas is the poem's real hinge. It asks the reader to decide whether the falling chimneys are a result of the swearing, a picture of it, or something else entirely.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It treats marriage neither as a greeting-card ideal nor as a battlefield. Instead it suggests that closeness has room for rough language and a certain amount of rubble, and that some of the best intimacy is the kind that can swear freely. The speaker includes himself ("my wife and me"), so the joke is never at his partner's expense. The poem also trusts its reader, giving two images and leaving the connection between them unspoken. Like a good private joke, it works because it does not explain itself.