Five lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and Dave Bonta still fits a whole critique of celebrity inside them. The title is the place to start. Most readers will recognise it as the name of a television programme about glamour and money, and it promises glitter. The poem then withholds it.
The first line sets up an irony: "the fortunate lovers". "Fortunate" means lucky and also well-off, and it is exactly the word a gossip column would use. But the verb that follows is "lay", which sits close to "lie" in the ear. The lovers are lying together, but the word also hints at things laid down and put away, and perhaps at something untrue. Then comes the comparison, "as empty / as a castle in a box". The line break after "empty" is clever, because the reader gets the emptiness before being told what it resembles. A castle usually stands for wealth, power and fairy-tale romance. Here it is a boxed toy or model, still in its packaging, with the fantasy reduced to merchandise. The poem doesn't say the lovers are unhappy. It says they are hollow, which is quieter and more unsettling.
The second stanza strips away even more. "who he was she was" has no commas to tell us how to read it. It could be a pair of questions nobody answers, or it could mean that whatever he was, she was too, so that the two become interchangeable. Either way, no one is named. The pronouns stand in for people the way the title stands in for a whole genre. The repeated "was" also gives the line a lulling, nursery-rhyme beat, like a record catching on the same groove.
Next comes "a pretty snare and hum". "Pretty" is a faintly dismissive adjective, all surface. A snare is a trap, a lure that works because it looks attractive. It is also a drum, so the word has a sound in it, and "hum" extends that into the murmur of publicity, or a television left on in an empty room. The line gives us appeal and background noise, but no substance. The sound of the poem supports this. The same dull, short vowel turns up in "lovers", "hum", "wonder" and "nothing", so the poem seems to hum along with what it describes.
The last line, "which wonder at nothing", is deliberately slippery. The plural verb "wonder" could attach to the couple or to the "snare and hum", and the phrase itself can be read in several ways. The pair may be so jaded that nothing amazes them. Or the only thing they, or we as the audience, can marvel at is nothing at all. Or the machinery of fame may be gazing at its own vacancy. The poem doesn't choose, and the uncertainty is part of its point. "Nothing" also answers "empty" from the first line, so the poem begins and ends on absence.
Structurally, the poem is a two-line stanza followed by a three-line one, in free verse with no rhyme, so its music comes from rhythm and repeated sounds instead. The first line is long and falls away on the unstressed ending of "empty". The second is shorter and lands on the hard, one-syllable "box", which sounds like a lid closing. The final line again trails off on "nothing". With no full stop, the poem never formally ends, and that unfinished feeling suits a subject that is all display and no centre.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It doesn't lecture or name a target. It relies on a few well-chosen images, a title that sets up an expectation, and grammar loose enough to let several meanings coexist. It also quietly implicates the reader. If the "hum" is the sound of our attention, then we are part of the machine that keeps those castles in their boxes.