A tavern is meant to be warm: bodies, noise, something poured into a glass. Dave Bonta's poem opens by sending ice and snow into one, and the people inside, far from objecting, demand them. The scene is absurd, but it is told so calmly that it feels like ordinary news. That deadpan tone drives the whole poem. Its subject is desire, specifically the odd, unaccountable things we want, and it treats those wants with amusement rather than judgment.
The first sentence has a pleasing ambiguity. "Ice and snow / go into a tavern" makes them sound like customers pushing through the door. Then "people demand them" turns them into goods on order, like beer or bread. Are they guests or wares? The poem never says, and the blur suits a world where the usual rules of cause and effect have loosened a little. The logic is closer to a riddle or a dream than to an anecdote. The dash after "tavern" works like a small drumroll before the odd payoff of the crowd's demand.
Then the poem turns inward, and the pronoun changes from "people" to "I." The speaker's own tastes turn out to be just as strange: "I kiss a lady on a card / and talk with a whistle." Both actions involve a stand-in. A lady "on a card" might be a playing-card queen, a postcard, or a photograph. In any of these she is flat, silent, and safe to kiss. The whistle is just as slippery. "Talk with a whistle" could mean the speaker converses using one, or that the whistle is the one being talked to. Either way, speech is replaced by sound without words. The speaker's pleasures are substitutes for the real thing, offered with the same straight face as the crowd's craving for snow.
The poem also keeps coming back to the mouth. A tavern is where people drink, a kiss uses the lips, and talking and whistling both need them. The title, "Funny tastes," pulls this together. "Taste" can mean a flavor on the tongue or a personal preference, and "funny" can mean peculiar or comic. Ice and snow are almost flavorless and mostly just cold, which makes the crowd's demand for them even stranger. Meanwhile the speaker, who might have been expected to stand apart as the sane observer, turns out to have a taste that is stranger still.
The form supports this. There is no end rhyme, but the poem has quiet echoes. "Snow" at the end of the first line rhymes with "go" at the start of the second, so the rhyme crosses the line break and gives the opening a small push forward. The hissing sounds in "ice," "snow," "kiss," and "whistle" thread through the poem, and the last of them, "whistle," sounds a little like the breath it describes. The lines grow longer as the poem moves from public to private, from three syllables ("Ice and snow") to seven ("I kiss a lady on a card"). The poem is also built from only two sentences, one about "people" and one about "I," and the symmetry makes the speaker's oddities feel like the crowd's, only closer.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it declines to explain. It gives no reason for the thirst for snow, no story about the lady or the whistle, and no moral. In five short lines it suggests that wanting is irrational, that we often settle for pictures and noises, and that everyone in the room is in the same position. A smug poem would have laughed at the tavern crowd. This one slips the speaker in among them, and the humor becomes companionable. The reader is left to decide whether these substitutes are sad, silly, or quietly satisfying, and the poem works because it allows all three readings.