Dave Bonta's short poem sounds like waking up with a bad feeling you can't shake. The speaker says that last night "brought back" something "in the mouth of my fear," as if fear itself were an animal carrying home a dead thing it found. What returns is the sense that "we are not rid of our trouble." The "we" matters: this isn't only a private worry but a shared one, tied up in what the speaker calls "our whole hate business."
The last lines are the sharpest. In a place "where a lie is true," falsehood has become accepted fact, and the poem calls it "so much rope." Rope can tie people up, hold things together, or hang someone, and the poem leaves that choice uncomfortably open. The title suggests that people who spread fear are part of this, though the poem never names them directly. The mood is tense and weary, with a quiet anger underneath. The short, bare lines give it a clipped, almost warning-like feel.