A TV dinner is the meal designed for not paying attention: sealed, heated, eaten on a lap while something glows in the corner. Dave Bonta's poem never mentions a television. The title supplies the screen, and the four lines that follow describe what it serves. The central idea is that taking in the day's news over supper has become a matter of good manners, and that something in the speaker, represented by a cup of coffee, refuses to go along with it.
The first couplet is built from small, plain words. "Dinner with the news" turns on its preposition. You have dinner *with* a person, so the news is seated at the table like a guest, or perhaps served as a side dish. Then comes "ash in a dish of evening," where the image does several jobs at once. "Dish" is the meal, but it is also the shallow saucer an ashtray resembles, so the evening is something cigarettes have been stubbed out in. Judging by the imagery, "dish" might even nod to the satellite dish that brings the broadcast in. The sound helps too: "ash" and "dish" close on the same hushed *sh*, which makes the phrase feel like a single grey puff. Ash is what remains after something has burned, and that is a bleak way to describe the news, the leftovers of events that have already happened to someone else. It carries a faint funeral note as well, though the poem never presses it.
Look at the grammar and you notice that the poem has no verbs. Nothing is done, only placed: dinner beside news, ash within dish. Even the second couplet drops the "is" that would normally join "my coffee" to "an argument." This suits the subject, since the scene is one of passive reception. The only gesture of energy is held inside a noun, "argument," a word that contains opposition in its very meaning. The sound of "argument against" also seems to double back on itself, the *arg* turning into *aga*, as if the phrase were pushing against its own grain.
Then there is the length of the lines. By my count they run five, seven, nine and ten syllables, so the poem swells as it goes. The vocabulary changes with it. The first couplet is short, mostly one-syllable words (*news*, *ash*, *dish*). The last line is a mouthful of Latinate abstraction: "that overbalance of propriety." The language itself tips over under its own weight, which is exactly what "overbalance" describes. "Propriety" is the vocabulary of etiquette and decorum, the stiff register of someone who knows how things should be done. The word "that" feels weary rather than explanatory, like a gesture toward something everyone already recognises. One might also hear in "balance" an echo of the news's own ideal of even-handedness, which the poem hints can become too much of a good thing. The poem leaves the target unspecified, so the reader has to decide whether the excess politeness belongs to the broadcast, to the ritual of the meal, or to the speaker's own willingness to sit quietly and swallow disaster with dessert.
Against all this stands the coffee, the poem's only possessive and its only real personality ("my"). Coffee is bitter and stimulating, the opposite of the sedative comfort of a ready meal and a glowing screen. It is also dark, the same grey-brown range as ash, so the rebellion is staged within the scene's own palette and does not escape it. The speaker's protest is tiny and domestic, a drink doing the talking, and the dry humor of that keeps the poem from sounding like a lecture.
The poem is worth reading because it compresses a whole habit of modern life into four unpunctuated, lowercase lines. The missing full stop leaves the argument open, as if the thought were still going on in the speaker's head. It does not tell us what to think about the news. It shows how easily dreadful information becomes background for a meal, and it suggests that resisting this might begin with something as small as staying awake enough to disagree.