Dave Bonta's poem starts with one of the smallest domestic miseries, a night of flea bites, and ends somewhere much larger: a sour little joke about who gets to feed on whom. Its central idea is that exploitation works like parasitism. The powerful take what they want, at any hour, and the people they feed on are expected to be gracious about it.
The first three lines read like a plain complaint. "A bad night for fleas / the weather cold as winter / all over my body." Even here the syntax won't sit still. Because the last line stands alone, "all over my body" can attach to the cold, which spreads across the speaker's skin, or to the fleas, which crawl over it. The phrase "a bad night for fleas" is oddly generous, too. It treats the speaker's suffering as the insects' bad luck, as if the fleas were the ones to pity. That small tilt of sympathy prepares the ground for the second stanza, where the poem's point of view becomes unsettling.
The turn comes with no connecting word at all: "the poor go out only on Sundays." The poem never explains how fleas lead to the poor, and the gap is the point. The line suggests lives of labour with a single free day, and it sets up a contrast with the final phrase, "at any time." The poor get Sundays, while those who "itch and tick and eat" get every hour. The poem's whole class argument sits in the distance between those two time frames.
The most pointed phrase is "good-natured about the privileges of power." It is the longest line in the poem, and its smooth, official-sounding abstractions ("privileges," "power") contrast sharply with the bodily verbs that follow. The syntax lets us read the poor as the ones being "good-natured," so that tolerance becomes part of the problem. They put up with the biting, and the poem lets that politeness hang there with quiet disgust. The word "privileges" is ironic as well. Normally it suggests something granted and honourable, but here it is only the right to scratch at someone else's skin.
The verbs in the closing lines are the poem's most compressed writing: "to itch and tick and eat." Repeating "and" slows the line into a list, as if the appetite never has to stop for breath. "Itch" and "tick" share a hard, clipped sound, and "tick" does double work. It names a bloodsucking parasite, but it also sounds like a clock, which fits the phrase "at any time" that follows. That clock reading is my own inference, but it fits the poem's preoccupation with who owns the hours. Read that way, the parasites are not only feeding but keeping time over the poor.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines vary in length, from the short "all over my body" to the long, bureaucratic sweep of the sixth line. The poem uses no capital letters and no punctuation, not even a full stop at the end. The sentence simply trails off into "at any time," so the feeding never visibly finishes. The compression is haiku-like, but the poem does not follow a haiku pattern. It behaves more like an overheard remark that suddenly turns bitter.
The title, "Parasitic," is the one explicit label, and it works as a key. Without it, the second stanza could seem a non sequitur. With it, we see that the speaker's bitten body can stand in for the body of the poor, and the fleas for those who live off them. Because the poem arrives at that conclusion through itching, cold and a sleepless night rather than through slogans, the political point comes across as something felt on the skin.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It takes a worn comparison, the powerful as parasites, and makes it fresh by keeping it physical and understated, even faintly comic. A poem that shouted would be easier to ignore. This one scratches.