A phone is supposed to be the opposite of an anchor. Yet in Dave Bonta's "Mobile device," the word "anchor" arrives in the third couplet, and the speaker, despite owning a gadget built for movement, ends up staying put, thumbing a screen while real stones lie somewhere unvisited. The clash between "mobile" and "anchor" drives the whole poem.
On its surface, the poem is a short confession about leaning on a handheld device. It opens with "an instrument to set / my trust upon," and the word "instrument" does a lot of work. It can mean a tool, a musical instrument, or a navigational one, and all three meanings suit a gadget that is used, played and consulted. "Set my trust upon" sounds older and more solemn than the subject deserves, like the language of faith. The device is quietly promoted from a tool to something close to an object of worship.
The second couplet makes this more intimate: "I cannot have a better / world to finger." The line break leaves "a better" hanging, so for a moment the sentence seems to be about wanting more. Then "finger," used as a verb, pulls everything down to fingertip scale. The world becomes something swiped, stroked and handled, like a rosary or a fretboard. The tone is hard to pin down. The speaker could be content (nothing could be better than this) or resigned (this is all that's on offer). The poem never says which, and that uncertainty is its most honest feature.
The third couplet, "asking many things of it / green as an anchor," is the strangest. With no punctuation, the grammar slides, and it isn't clear what is green: the device, the asking, or the speaker. Green might suggest newness and inexperience, as in "green" questions put to a machine. It might also suggest the glow of a screen, or the green that gathers on old metal left in water. An anchor holds a ship in place, so the image feels like both security and confinement. The speaker keeps asking the device for answers, and the device keeps him fixed where he is.
Then comes the turn: "apping over the stones / I did not go see." "Apping" looks like "tapping" with its first letter clipped off, or like "hopping" bent toward "app." Either way, the verb is as truncated as the experience it describes. "Over the stones" suggests skimming rather than stepping among them, the way a flat stone skips across water without sinking in. The stones are never identified, and the poem trusts readers to imagine a path, a ruin or a riverbed. What matters is the flat, almost embarrassed phrase "I did not go see." Until now every line has been in the present tense, and this is the first and only admission of something left undone. The past tense arrives like a bill.
The construction supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, with no steady meter. The four tidy couplets look like small screens or text messages stacked on a page. Line endings fall on weak, leaning words such as "upon" and "a better," so the reader feels the poem reaching toward something it doesn't quite touch. The sounds are soft and clipped: the hissing of "set," "trust" and "stones," and the light p's of "upon" and "apping," which tap like fingertips on glass.
The poem's significance lies in what it refuses to do. It never lectures about technology, and it never contrasts a noble past with a shallow present. The speaker says "I" and implicates himself, and in eight lines he moves from trust to touch to questioning to substitution. The ending is an absence, a place not visited, and it lingers because the poem leaves the judgment to the reader. It also leaves a question about who is mobile here, the device in the hand or the person holding it.