The title "Consumer" sets a small trap. We expect shopping bags and receipts, and Dave Bonta gives us a speaker who "make[s] nothing / but order." The word does double duty. A consumer uses things up, but "consumption" was also an old name for a wasting disease, and the poem seems to play in the gap between those meanings. Its subject is a person settled into a tidy, well-supplied life who begins to feel that the life is using them up. The central idea is that comfort and order can leave a person hollow, and that this emptiness raises a question the speaker cannot answer alone.
The first four lines form a single sentence, and its opening is blunt. "I make nothing" is a complete confession before the next line softens it with "but order." Order sounds like an achievement, yet it is really an absence, since a tidy room is one where nothing is out of place. The comma in "but order, get things / ready" turns the sentence into a list of chores. "Get things ready" is the language of preparing for guests, for a journey, perhaps for a funeral. Then comes the odd phrase "against the ivy." Judging by the imagery, "against" can mean "in preparation for" or "as a defence against." Ivy is what creeps over neglected walls and old gravestones, so the speaker is either bracing for nature's slow takeover or keeping it at bay with housework.
Line four is the strangest: "a grave jealous of the kitchen." It is an appositive with nothing to attach to, so we cannot be sure whether it describes the speaker's orderliness, the prepared things, or the speaker. The word "grave" also flickers between noun and adjective, a burial place and a serious mood. The kitchen is where food is made and eaten, a place of warmth and appetite where consuming sustains life. Making the grave jealous of it is a clever reversal, because death is the ultimate consumer and even it envies the living their meals. The speaker's immaculate order starts to look like a rehearsal for lying still.
The last three lines change the tone. "I was so satisfied, I wept" is plain reporting, but the reaction does not match the cause. "Satisfied" is the word of a happy customer, yet here it brings tears, as if getting everything one wanted were a loss. Then the poem turns to a plea: "Give me a good / reason for being." The line break matters. "Give me a good" hangs for a moment, and a reader hears "a good" as a commodity, one of the goods a consumer acquires, before the phrase lands on "reason." There is no "you" in the poem, so the request goes out to no one in particular. The flat, reportorial voice gives way to something nearly childlike, and the poem ends on the word "being," the biggest word in it.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, between about four and eight syllables, and sound like speech. The sounds still do some work. The long "i" returns in "I," "ivy," "satisfied" and the second "I," so the poem seems to circle its own speaker. A softer long "e" links "ready," "ivy," "reason" and "being," quietly tying the final question back to the earlier images of preparation. The hard "g" of "get," "grave" and "good" gives the middle of the poem a slightly clipped, defensive edge.
The poem is significant for how much it compresses. In seven lines it holds a critique of a life built on tidiness and appetite, an image of death hovering over domestic routine, and a real emotional breakdown, all without lecturing. It does not tell us what a good reason for being might be, and it ends on the request instead of an answer. For students, it shows that a very small poem can ask a very large question, and that a single pun, like "a good," can say as much as a whole stanza of explanation.