Three times a voice gives the same order: speak. Dave Bonta's "Propriety" is only six short lines, yet it reads like a miniature etiquette manual in which every rule is slightly off. The title promises what is fitting and proper, which makes the oddness sharper. Whatever the poem teaches about speech, it teaches by showing how often speech is misplaced.
The first couplet sets two registers side by side: "speak for this warlord / our number one self." "Warlord" is violent and political, a man who rules by force. "Number one" is playground language, the phrase of someone looking out for himself. Putting them together shrinks the tyrant and enlarges the ego. The pronoun matters too. The warlord is not someone else's, because "our" makes him the self everyone carries around. To "speak for" him is to be his mouthpiece, and the poem seems to suggest that we do this constantly without noticing. The word "this" points at him as if he were standing in the room.
The second couplet moves from the loud to the unhearing: "speak into ears of ash / teach music to the swan." Ash is what remains once burning is finished, so ears made of it can never take anything in. The word "into" makes the speaker's voice drop into a hollow. The swan line leans on the old legend of the swan's song, sung at the end of life. If that legend is in play, teaching music to the swan is pointless, since the swan already owns the most famous song in folklore. Both lines describe effort wasted on listeners who cannot receive it, or do not need it.
The prepositions are quietly doing a lot of work. The poem moves from speaking *for*, which is advocacy, to speaking *into*, which is addressing a void, and finally to speaking *at*. That last word is the coldest of the three: "speak at a grave." Nothing is being given or exchanged, and the words just land on stone. Then the poem turns: "as little as in bed." The sentence is still an order to speak, but the order is cut down as it is issued. Bed and grave are both places where we lie down, and one can hear sleep, love and death all faintly in the pairing. Either the poem is saying that the grave deserves the same hush as a bedroom, or it is noting, a little wryly, how few words we really manage in either place. The line holds both readings without choosing, and that ambiguity is where its feeling lives. Propriety, in the end, seems to mean knowing when words are an intrusion.
Formally, the poem is very bare. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme, so the lines arrive like a list of instructions with nothing to tell us how seriously to take them. The music is subtler. "Speak," "self" and "swan" share a hissing, breathy start, and "ash" echoes it in the middle of a line. The line lengths are also worth counting. The first couplet runs five syllables and five. The second runs six and six. The third drops to four and then rises to six. Two couplets are evenly balanced, but the third breaks the pattern: a clipped "speak at a grave," then a longer, softer, more domestic "as little as in bed." The poem does not snap shut but trails off, like a voice being lowered.
The repeated "speak" is anaphora, the kind of repetition found in chants and commands. Here the repetition works against itself. The audiences become steadily worse at listening. The warlord hears only himself, the ash hears nothing, and the grave is beyond hearing altogether.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries in so little space. In six lines it puts the ego, deafness, mortality and intimacy under one question: what is speech actually for? It never lectures. It hands us a set of commands, lets us feel how absurd most of them are, and then makes its one gentle exception for silence.