Six short lines, three couplets, not a single punctuation mark: Dave Bonta's "King of the trolls" reads like an insult muttered under the breath, and it cuts deeper for how little it says. It sketches a man the poem never names, whose greed has shrunk him to something less than human. The central idea is old and simple, that a life given wholly to profit empties the heart. What makes it worth reading is how strangely and bluntly the idea is put.
Start with the title. A king should be grand, but trolls, in the folktale tradition, are lurking, grabbing creatures, so this crown is a backhanded promotion: he rules a kingdom of brutes. Modern readers may hear the internet sense of "troll" too, but the poem's imagery of hands and hearts points toward the monster of the old stories.
The first couplet loads its insult into sound. "The backward bastard" has two hard b's that land like spits, and "that" in place of "who" quietly strips the man of personhood. "Backward" could mean slow, regressive, or simply facing the wrong way. Then comes the oddest phrase in the poem: he "married his troll hands." Marriage should be a promise to another person, but he has pledged himself to his own grasping hands. The phrase suggests devotion to the act of taking, and judging by the wording, the hands were already monstrous before the vow.
The second couplet brings the poem's only gentleness, and only to deny it. "In his heart no part / of a rose" contains the poem's single true rhyme, *heart* and *part*, and it sits inside the line rather than at the end, so it clicks shut like a lock. The line break does the rest. "No part" hangs for a moment, as if the heart has been emptied out, and then "of a rose" arrives alone on the shortest line, only three syllables. The rose is the traditional emblem of tenderness and love, and here it is physically squeezed into the smallest space on the page.
Then "but" turns the third couplet. It doesn't mean "however" so much as "except": there is nothing of a rose in his heart except business. The triple "business business business" is the loudest moment in the poem, and it works like a cash register or a drone. Repeat any word enough and it loses its meaning and becomes noise, which is the point. The b sounds of "backward bastard" return in "but business," so the opening spit seems to continue.
After that drumbeat comes the drop: "low as a glob." The simile is slightly absurd, since a glob has no height to measure, and that absurdity feeds the contempt. "Glob" is hard to say without feeling something thick and wet, formless and sticky, something that has been dropped. "Low" works twice, for the crouching troll and for moral baseness. It could describe the heart or the whole man, and the poem doesn't choose.
The rhythm supports all this. There is no regular meter, and the lines run roughly five, six, five, three, seven and four syllables. That gives a pattern of squeeze, burst and collapse: the rose line shrinks, the business line swells with its stamping repetition, and the last line falls away with a thud. The lack of punctuation and capitals adds to the sense of one unbroken mutter, with no full stop to let the man off.
The poem's progression is also worth noticing. It moves from hands (what he does), to heart (what he feels, or fails to), to glob (what he has become). It goes from outside to inside to shapelessness, a whole decline in six lines, and it never lectures. It offers a rose, a troll and a glob, and lets the reader reach the verdict.
Its significance lies in that compression. The poem is small and doesn't pretend otherwise, but it shows how a satirical portrait can work through fairy-tale imagery and the sound of words. It also shows how a single flower, glimpsed for one line, can make an absence feel total.