A beer, a rant and a confession that curdles: Dave Bonta's "Hearing" fits all of this into eight lines and barely thirty-six words. The speaker drinks and "went off / on everything." The line break does something clever here. "Went off" is complete in itself, so the reader first hears someone leaving or exploding, and only then does "on everything" reveal the target. Nothing is spared. What follows is a kind of permission: "no one expecting me / to lie to the people." The relief is that the speaker doesn't have to perform politeness or keep up a public face. The poem's central tension is that this freedom feels good and is then, in the last couplet, quietly condemned.
The third couplet is the hinge. "I was loose" works on several levels, since it can mean drunk, unbuttoned or free of restraint, and "loose talk" is a phrase we already know. Then comes the odd, slippery line "I put on feeling." To put something on is to dress in it, which suggests that the feeling may be a costume. But it can also mean simply taking feeling up, as one takes up a task. The poem doesn't say which. That ambiguity matters, because the speaker has just announced he isn't lying, yet the verb hints that the honesty itself might be staged.
Then the voice changes. Up to now the speaker has been the agent: I drank, I went off, I was loose. In the last couplet he is "called up for this strange use," with the "was" dropped, and the grammar turns passive, as if he had been summoned or drafted. "Called up" suggests a summons, and the title "Hearing" supports that reading. Judging by the text, a hearing might be something heard, such as a call or a vocation, or a place where someone is made to answer. Both fit. "Use" is also a telling word, because it makes the speaker a tool. His purpose, the poem says flatly, is "to shit in the well."
That image carries the poem's whole argument. A well is shared, the place the community drinks from, and the speaker earlier refused to "lie to the people." The last line suggests that the truth-telling, or what passes for it, may foul the thing the people depend on. The poem sets up a puzzle and doesn't solve it. Honest outbursts might cleanse, or they might simply pollute. The crude verb, the only taboo word in the poem, lands at the end like a punchline, but the joke is turned against the speaker.
The construction supports this. The poem is four unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters after the opening "I," so it moves like speech without breath marks. Almost every word is a monosyllable, and the only longer ones are "everything," "expecting," "people" and "feeling," which keeps the diction at bar-stool level. Many couplets end mid-thought and pull the reader on, while the final line is blunt and plain, five simple syllables with nothing left to add.
There are also subtler sound patterns. "Loose" and "use" sit in the same position at the start of the third and fourth couplets, and they chime, so the sound itself links being free to being used. "Beer" echoes the title's "Hearing," and "feeling" and "everything" share its ending, so the opening and closing words of the title seem to run through the poem. The long "e" in "beer," "me," "people" and "feeling" gives the first six lines a loose, open sound that the final couplet, with its short, hard "shit" and "well," shuts down.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it enacts what it describes. It is itself a short, rough outburst, and by confessing the outburst it asks whether confession is any cleaner. It gives us no answer and no neat moral. It leaves the reader in the speaker's position, enjoying the looseness and then, a line later, unsure what has been left in the water.