A reporter is supposed to tell us what happened. Dave Bonta's speaker begins with a less comfortable admission: the stock-in-trade is "my collection / of lies and employments." The two nouns sit side by side as if they were the same kind of object, and the effect is quietly damning. Jobs, roles and the things we do to get by are filed alongside untruths. "Putting in order" makes the confession sound like a clerical chore, like sorting a drawer, and that is where the poem's dry humour comes from. The title promises a witness, but the opening gives us a witness who audits himself or herself first.
The middle stanza does most of the work. "I have gone through melancholy" works two ways. It can mean endured, like a bad season, or rummaged through, as though melancholy were another box in the collection. Then comes the strangest phrase, "keeping myself on no hope / as an experiment." To be kept "on" something suggests a diet or a medical regimen, and here the thing prescribed is the absence of hope. "Experiment" is a cold, laboratory word. It holds the feeling at arm's length and turns the speaker into their own test subject. Next, abruptly, comes "dancing to the great evil of this year." Dancing is the poem's only image of energy, and it is defiant and ironic, because we dance *to* music and so the evil becomes the soundtrack. The poem names no events, so the "evil" stays open. Judging by the text alone, it could be public catastrophe or private misfortune. The stanza closes on "a miscarriage of time." The phrase suggests both a pregnancy that failed and a "miscarriage of justice," a process that broke down. Either way, the year is something that went wrong in the making and produced nothing living.
The construction supports this bleakness. There is no rhyme, no regular metre and no punctuation at all. The vocabulary splits in two. Latinate, administrative words (collection, melancholy, experiment, miscarriage) carry the detached tone, while the language of the last stanza turns plain and physical: "the hole is all I know." The missing punctuation lets the grammar slide. Does "dancing to the great evil of this year" attach to the speaker, to the experiment, or to neither? Does "a miscarriage of time" rename the year, the evil or the dancing? The reader has to choose, and the ambiguity mimics a mind that cannot separate its troubles into neat categories. The stanzas of two, five and three lines narrow as they go, from the tidy opening act of sorting to a final stanza that is short and bare. Its middle line, "but I continue," is the only moment of decision. The line break leaves us hanging for a beat, wondering what exactly is being continued.
The answer is the best image in the poem: "to lick this ink." Licking is animal and compulsive, like licking a wound or a bowl for the last traces. Ink is the reporter's material, but nobody would choose to taste it. It is dark, bitter and staining. Placed next to "the hole," it suggests that writing is what the speaker feeds on while surrounded by emptiness. The demonstrative "this" makes the ink immediate, something right here under the tongue. The sounds help too. "Lick" and "ink" share a short *i* and a hard *k*, so the phrase clicks shut like a small, stubborn habit.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to console. No hope arrives, the hole is not filled, and the writing does not redeem anything. Nor does it flatter the writer: the person who reports is also the person with a drawer full of lies. In ten short lines the poem offers an unglamorous reason for writing, which is not that it helps but that it is what is left to taste. That is bleak, but it is also honest, and the deadpan wit keeps the honesty from becoming self-pity.