Five short lines, no punctuation, not one capital letter. Dave Bonta's "Wealth" looks less like a poem than a list scribbled by someone with nothing to write on. Its title makes a promise the lines refuse to keep, and the poem lives in the gap between the two.
The first line, "for some past sin," arrives mid-thought, a phrase with nothing before it, as if we have walked in on a verdict already being read. The sin is only "some" sin, unnamed, perhaps forgotten, perhaps never committed. What matters is the logic it implies: loneliness and poverty as punishment, a debt being paid off. Then comes "I have no one," and the verb of ownership is made to describe an absence. This is the poem's first sly move. Wealth is an accountant's word, and the speaker is keeping accounts, but the first entry is a zero.
The next entries are hardly richer. "A shed where I sleep" is a building meant for tools, not people, and the speaker says only that he sleeps there, not that he lives there. The missing punctuation matters here. Without a comma, "I have no one / a shed where I sleep" can slide together, so that a person who isn't there and a shed that is stand side by side on the same ledger. We cannot tell where one item ends and the next begins, and the speaker's life seems to have become one undivided run of lack.
The strangest possession is "a never-heard wit." The hyphen squeezes a whole sentence into a single adjective. Wit is the most social of talents, because it exists only when someone laughs. Without a listener it is a coin that never gets spent, and line two explains why: having "no one" produces the silence of line four. There is a pleasing trick in this, though. The phrase is itself dry and self-mocking, a small piece of wit, and the speaker's claim about the wit is overheard by us. The poem quietly proves the very thing it says is impossible, and the reader becomes the listener the speaker lacks.
The sound and shape of the lines carry the same movement. Counting syllables gives roughly four, four, five, seven, and then two. The lines swell as the inventory grows, "and now" tips over the line break, and the poem drops onto "this street." There is no rhyme, but there are echoes: "some" and "one" chime across the first two lines, and the s-sounds of "sin," "shed" and "sleep" lead to "street," which shares its long *ee* with "sleep." That near-rhyme links the place he sleeps with the place where the poem ends, and the street seems to be where the shed has been leading. Whether the shed is gone or still there, the poem does not say, and it is better for leaving that open. The word "this" does a lot, too. It points, as if the speaker were gesturing at his surroundings, and it moves the poem from private matters like sin, sleep and loneliness into public space, where there is no door to close.
As for the title, "wealth" comes from the older word "weal," meaning well-being, and the poem tallies the lack of exactly that. The irony is obvious, but the tone keeps a second reading alive. Everything on the list is something the speaker still has, including the wit, so the title may be bitter, defiant, or both at once. The deadpan voice never settles the question.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. There is no complaint, no appeal for sympathy, and almost no adjective except "never-heard," which does all the emotional work. In a handful of words it asks what we count as riches and who gets counted at all. Its last two syllables leave us standing on the street with the speaker, and the questions it has raised stay with us.