In Dave Bonta's "Blues", love is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It is a job. The first verb is "labor", and the speaker's task is to think of love while pushing away what keeps crowding in: "ash" and "the void of death". The opening line admits what many love poems hide. The dark thought comes easily, and tenderness takes effort.
The phrase that holds the poem together is "give over", and it is worth slowing down on. It can mean to abandon something, as you give up a bad habit, or to hand something over, to surrender it. The speaker gives over thoughts of death in the first stanza, then repeats the phrase for "thoughts of sex". The repetition sounds like a list of renunciations, yet the second item is strange company for the first. Death is an obvious thing to push aside in order to think of love, but why sex? One reading is that sex, in the abstract, is just another idea, and the speaker wants something more particular than any idea. The poem never explains, and that restraint is part of its character.
Then comes the swerve: "and the door to the shop". After "ash" and "the void of death", a door is almost comically ordinary. Grammatically it belongs to the list of things being surrendered, but it reads like a stray detail breaking in. Judging by what follows, it may belong to the remembered scene, as if the mind, trying to let go of big abstractions, snags on a real object from a real place.
The last stanza confirms that shift from thought to memory. "The first time I was with her" is plain speech, all short words. Then the language becomes odd and precise: "drinking my eyes into soreness / at that light". It is not quite clear who is drinking what. The eyes seem to drink the light, and to be drunk on it, until they ache. This is looking so greedy that it hurts, and the soreness mixes pleasure with pain, which is the blues in miniature. The demonstrative "that" matters too. It points at the light as if it were still in front of the speaker, and the poem ends there with no verb to close the sentence and no full stop. The thought simply stays in the light.
The form supports this. It is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation. Lines are short, with roughly two to four stresses each, and the stanzas run three lines, two lines, three lines, so the brief middle stanza acts as a hinge between the abstract opening and the remembered scene. Without commas or capitals, the sentences run together like one long breath, and "give over" builds into a kind of refrain. The sound shifts as well. The first stanza is full of dry, closed words: "ash", "void", "death". The final stanza opens up with a run of long *i* sounds: "time", "I", "eyes", "light". The speaker's "I" and his "eyes" chime with the light they look at, and that echo is the nearest the poem comes to music.
That brings us back to the title. "Blues" suggests a mood, a kind of song, and perhaps a colour, though the poem names no colour and any blue in that light is the reader's guess. Blues music tends to name the trouble plainly and keep going, and the poem does something similar: it states the pull of death and answers with persistence rather than argument.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it enacts its own idea. It starts with big, empty nouns (love, ash, void, death, sex) and finds its way out through small, physical things: a door, a shop, sore eyes, a particular light. Love is never defined. It is located in a memory, and the poem suggests that this is how despair gets resisted, not by grand thoughts but by returning to one sensation. The poem ends on light rather than ash, which reverses the pull of its first stanza, and it does so in only eight lines.