Rage is usually something that happens to a person. In Dave Bonta's "Routine" it is something a person puts on, like a shirt. That small shift carries the whole poem. Four lines and two sentences give us a speaker who has turned fury at the state of things into a daily habit, as ordinary as getting dressed and having a snack.
Start with the verb in the first line. "I dress myself in rage" makes anger a garment, chosen and fastened each morning. Clothing is both protection and display, so the image hints at a speaker who wears anger as armour while also letting everyone see it. The target arrives in the next line, and it is deliberately vague: "abominable dealings." "Abominable" is a heavy, almost scriptural word, the vocabulary of things beyond forgiveness. "Dealings" is flat and transactional, the language of contracts and backroom bargains. That mismatch tells us something. Nobody is named and no scandal is specified, so we get only a moral temperature and a whiff of corrupt commerce. The vagueness works in the poem's favour, because any reader can drop in their own outrage. It also suggests the dealings are so constant they no longer need describing. Notice the prepositions too. The speaker is dressed *in* rage but angry *at* the dealings, so the feeling is both worn and aimed.
The second couplet moves from outside to inside. Rage is worn, but rot is swallowed. "I eat a bad apple a day" bends the old proverb about an apple a day keeping the doctor away, and the swerve is the poem's sharpest joke. The proverb promises a routine that protects you, while this one delivers a daily dose of spoilage. "Bad apple" also carries its idiomatic meaning, the one corrupt member who ruins the rest, so the line can be read as literal food or as a daily mouthful of corruption: the same abominable dealings, now digested. Whether the speaker does this as penance, endures it, or accepts it as the price of paying attention is left open. The apple's long association with temptation and knowledge may hover in the background, though the poem never leans on it.
Then comes the final image, "in a cold tavern." A tavern is meant to be warm, a place of talk and company, and also a place where dealings get made. "Cold" strips away the comfort. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is alone or in an empty room, one that has the shape of fellowship without the substance.
The construction mirrors the content. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, only two couplets built on the same pattern: "I," a present-tense verb, then a phrase of circumstance. That symmetry makes the poem a routine on the page as well as in its subject. The sound does quiet work as well. "Rage" and "day" end the first and third lines on the same long vowel, a faint echo rather than a rhyme, as if the pattern repeats without anyone bothering to tidy it. Line two stretches across the five syllables of "abominable," slowing the voice into disgust. Line three skips along with the bounce of a proverb, "bad apple a day" tumbling over its short a's. Line four closes on the clipped, hard consonants of "cold tavern," like a latch dropping.
What makes the poem worth reading is its deadpan restraint. It refuses the drama we expect from anger, with no shouting, no named villain and no exclamation. The title does the interpretive work, quietly insisting that this fury is not an event but a schedule. That frame is what makes the poem unsettling, because it shows how outrage can become so constant that it starts to feel like normal life. The dry humour of the twisted proverb makes the bleakness more convincing, not less. Beneath the joke sits a question the poem leaves for the reader. If you put on rage every morning and swallow rot every day, is that protest, or just a habit with a darker flavour? And what does a diet like that do to the person eating it?