A newspaper, in Dave Bonta's "News junkie," is less a window on the world than a market stall. The vocabulary gives it away: the morning papers "exchange" one thing for another and hold "a great store" of goods. What they trade is "discontent," and what they hand back is "tattle." Read one way, the papers take in our dissatisfaction and give us gossip in return. Read another, they simply swap one kind of restlessness for another. The syntax is slippery enough to allow both, and either way the deal is a poor one.
The word choices do most of the work. "Great store" promises abundance, and then "tattle" deflates it. This is a schoolyard word, the sound of children telling on each other, and it shrinks whatever fills the front page to petty whispering. "And God knows what" is a throwaway idiom, a shrug, yet it also admits that the sheer pile of information has outrun anyone's ability to sort it. The dash after it is the poem's hinge, and what follows is the verdict: "a mad theater." A theater needs a stage, performers and an audience, and that casts the reader as a spectator. "Mad" can mean insane or frenzied, and the poem lets both meanings stand. The word "theater" may also faintly echo the phrase "theater of war," though that is an association the poem only hints at.
Then the grammar changes. Until now the morning papers have been the subject, a distant object under examination. With "Think of the trouble we go through," the poem switches to a command and to the first-person plural. The reader is no longer watching the mad theater but sitting in it. "Trouble" can mean effort, and it can also mean distress, and "go through" suggests an ordeal that is endured. The title's "junkie" starts to make sense here. The poem never mentions addiction directly, yet the picture of people going to great trouble for something that leaves them worse off is exactly what that word implies.
The last two lines are the most carefully balanced. "To see what will remain / of all our expectations" can mean that we read the paper to find out how much of our hope survives the day's events. It can also mean that the reading itself is what wears our hopes down. "Remain" belongs to the language of aftermath, of what is left standing after a fire or a flood. The ending also loops back to the beginning. The poem opens on "discontent" and closes on "expectations," and discontent is, more or less, what unmet expectations turn into. The poem finishes where its cause begins, much like a daily habit that sends us back to the paper tomorrow.
The form supports this sense of going in circles. It is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its lines run from about four to eight syllables, close to the rhythm of speech. Nothing chimes at the end of a line to give a sense of closure, which suits a poem about a problem that never resolves. The line breaks are placed with care. "Of all our expectations" waits on the last line, so the reader reaches "remain" and has a moment to wonder what will be left before the loss is named. There is also a quiet pattern of t sounds in "tattle," "theater," "think," "trouble," "through" and "to." In the second half they give the lines a clipped, pattering quality, like a restless tapping.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into seven short lines without lecturing. It does not tell us to stop reading the news, and it does not claim to stand above the habit. Its "we" and its imperative place the speaker among the guilty. Its tone is wry rather than angry, and the humor makes the criticism harder to dismiss. Although it is built around newsprint, the habit it describes, checking again and again for the latest bad news, will be familiar to anyone who reads headlines on a screen today. The poem's question stays open: if the news mostly takes our expectations apart, why do we keep turning up for the next performance?