Most poems about war send us to the battlefield. Dave Bonta's "Warmonger" keeps us in bed. "In bed, the war and I" puts the speaker and the war on equal terms, like two people sharing a pillow, and the next line makes it official: "agree to wed." The central idea is uncomfortable but sharp. Backing a war can be a willing intimacy, a relationship entered for appetite and advantage rather than duty or noble principle.
The title does a lot of the work. A "monger" is a trader, as in fishmonger, so a warmonger is literally someone who peddles war. The poem takes that commercial sense seriously, because after the wedding comes a transaction: "I gain entertainment, a trench, / and some talk of head fanatic." Look at what the speaker actually receives. Entertainment comes first, which suggests war as a spectacle watched from somewhere comfortable. The only physical gain is a trench, a hole in the ground, which is an odd wedding present. The last item is "talk," the cheapest currency there is. The profit is tiny, and the poem lets us see how tiny.
The line "a different drink for my wick" packs in several meanings at once. A wick drinks fuel, so war becomes a new kind of fuel for the speaker's flame. Judging by the imagery, a bottle with a wick in it could also suggest a petrol bomb, a drink that burns. And "dip your wick" is a crude idiom for sex, which suits the bedroom setting. The poem never chooses between these readings. Desire, appetite and violence share a single image, and that fusion is the poem's main trick.
The sound patterns work the same way. "Bed," "wed" and "head" rhyme, but the rhymes fall in lines one, two and five rather than at tidy line-ends. The chime of the wedding vow comes back inside "head fanatic," linking private pleasure to ideology. It is an ironic echo, since a jingly sound is attached to something ugly. Elsewhere the language is blunt and clipped. Most words are one syllable, and hard consonants snap through "wick," "trench," "fanatic" and "hat," so the lines read like slogans or fragments of overheard chatter.
That fragmentary quality shows most in "talk of head fanatic," which doesn't quite parse. We expect "a fanatic head" or "fanatical heads," but the grammar slips. The broken phrase feels like something half-heard, perhaps from a news report, and it leaves "head" open to more than one reading. The speaker is taking in war as noise and not really understanding it, though that is my inference from the phrasing.
The ending turns on a dash: "no honor—a hat / pulled down." The first half is flat and final, a denial of the glory that war usually claims. Then the line breaks on "hat," so the image hangs a moment before "pulled down" drops. Hats are pulled down to hide a face, to avoid being recognized, or out of shame, and the gesture suggests the speaker knows exactly what kind of bargain this was. The structure backs this up. The poem is only seven lines long, and the last two are the shortest, so it shrinks as it goes. After the grand verb "wed," the energy drains away, like a ceremony followed by an awkward morning.
The poem matters because of where it places blame. There is no distant general or politician here, only "I." The speaker does not fight, suffer or even travel. The war arrives in bed, as a companion, and that is how most of us meet wars we are not in: as stories, talk and entertainment. By making that closeness a marriage, the poem asks what we get from war's spectacle and what we hide when we pull our hats down. In seven short lines it manages to be funny, bawdy and accusing at once, and it leaves the reader with no easy place to stand.