Ten words, ten syllables, and every word a single beat: Dave Bonta's "Treadmill" is about as small as a poem can get while still having a turn in it. Its subject is repetitive work, the kind that fills a whole day and leads nowhere. Its central idea is that this labour is not only something we do, but something we are. The speaker doesn't say "I feel like a rat" or "I run like a rat." The speaker works "as a blind heart," and the rat is addressed rather than compared.
Start with the title, because it does a surprising amount of the poem's work. The lines themselves never mention a wheel, a gym or a cage. "Treadmill" supplies the setting, and the two lines supply the feeling that goes with it. The title also carries a double meaning that the poem lets us discover for ourselves. A treadmill is a machine for exercise, but it is also, in everyday speech, the name for a life of grinding routine. Put a rat next to it and the phrase "rat race" is not far away, although the poem never says it.
The most interesting thing in the poem is the small word "o." It is the old-fashioned sound of lyric address, the sound of poets speaking to nightingales, to the moon, to the west wind. Here it is aimed at a rat. That produces a mixture of tones. There is a flicker of comedy in the grand gesture used on a rodent, but there is also tenderness, as if the speaker were calling to a fellow creature across a gap. The syntax adds to the effect. "All day o rat / I work" can be read as the speaker talking to a rat while describing their own work. It can also be read as the speaker calling themselves the rat. The lack of punctuation never settles the question, and the ambiguity suggests the two have merged.
The second line then turns the poem inward, from the cage to the body. "I work as a blind heart" is odd in a useful way. Hearts do work, of course. They beat all day without being thanked or noticed. But a heart is also blind, shut inside the chest and unable to see where its effort is going. The word "blind" brings in two ideas at once. One is the physical fact that the heart pumps in the dark. The other is the sense of working without a view of any purpose, of running without knowing what the running is for. A rat on a wheel has the same problem. It moves hard and fast and stays exactly where it started. By the end, the rat and the heart have become two pictures of the same condition.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the line of monosyllables falls into an even, plodding pace, like feet on a belt. Even the line break has weight. "All day o rat" is a short, breathless line of four syllables, and the longer second line follows it like a body catching up. There is also a quiet echo between "rat" and "heart." Both begin and end with a pronounced "r" sound and a closing "t," and the letters of "rat" are all present inside "heart," only rearranged. Whether or not that was planned, it gives the poem a pleasing sense that the small, scurrying creature lives inside the large, human organ.
The missing full stop matters too. The poem has no capital letters at its start and no punctuation at its end, so it doesn't properly finish. A reader can go from "heart" straight back to "all day" and the lines start again, which is exactly how a treadmill behaves. The form enacts the idea. The poem sets up a loop and the reader runs it.
What makes "Treadmill" worth reading is that it asks a lot of very little. It refuses to explain, complain or draw a moral. It offers one address, one admission and one image, and it trusts the title to carry the rest. For a student of poetry, it shows that compression can be a way of making an argument: when every word is this plain and this exposed, a single choice like "blind" can change the meaning of the whole.