Dave Bonta's "Gunman" is only six lines long, yet it sets out a choice about how to live and then suggests where the pressure behind that choice comes from. The first stanza offers two ways of being in the world. One is to be "as present as the fast / dissembling wren." The other is "to unthank all with a gun." The second stanza moves indoors and into the body: "at night I hear my own / enemy of a heart."
The opening comparison is stranger than it first looks. Presence is usually imagined as openness, but the wren is "dissembling." The word means concealing, pretending, putting on a disguise. The poem seems to admire a presence that is quick, small and a little evasive, a way of being fully there without being fixed or exposed. The line break after "fast" adds to the effect. For a moment "fast" could mean quick, or firmly held, before "dissembling" arrives and settles it. Even the grammar darts about like the bird. A hint of "disassembling" may also sit inside the word, a suggestion of coming apart, though that is an inference. If so, the wren's presence carries a trace of fragility.
Against this stands "unthank," the poem's boldest word. It reverses gratitude, and it does so with a prefix, as if thankfulness were a thing you could take back. The gun is the instrument of that reversal. It doesn't merely harm. It cancels, and the sweeping "all" shows how total the refusal is. The "or" before it makes the two options equal in grammar, which is unsettling. The wren and the gun get the same weight, as though both were live possibilities for the speaker. The title makes this more pointed. "Gunman" names the person who chooses the second option, and since the poem speaks in the first person, the speaker has to wonder whether that person is himself.
The poem never says whether the gun points outward or inward, and that ambiguity is what makes it disturbing. "Unthank all" could mean lashing out at the world or withdrawing from it altogether. The second stanza leans toward the inward reading, but only gently. The heart is "my own / enemy of a heart," and the line break leaves "my own" hanging for a beat, so we expect a possession, perhaps even the gun, before the phrase turns on its object. The construction "enemy of a heart" works like "a devil of a time." The heart is no longer the traditional seat of feeling but something hostile, a presence in the dark that can't be argued with. At night, with nothing else to listen to, the speaker hears its beat. One could also hear the beat as a threat, but that is a reading, not something the poem states.
The form supports this quiet pressure. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so nothing marks where a thought ends and the poem can seem to lose its footing. The rhythm is loose in the first stanza, with its stretched, enjambed lines, but the second stanza tightens. "at night I hear my own" falls almost into a regular beat of unstressed and stressed syllables, a steady pulse, and then "enemy of a heart" lands with its extra syllables like a skipped or stumbling beat. The sounds do some of the work too. The soft, flickering "fast / dissembling wren" gives way in the fourth line to the blunt single syllable "gun," which closes the stanza with a thud.
The poem matters because it doesn't explain. It sets a small bird beside a weapon and lets the distance between them stand for a whole state of mind. It suggests that the urge to destroy and the urge to be present may come from the same restless place, and that the night is where the speaker has to face which one he will follow. In six lines, "Gunman" leaves us listening along with him.