Five short lines, no punctuation and no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Cruise lines" is small enough to read in ten seconds, and it still manages to turn the holiday industry inside out. The title is a pun, since "cruise lines" are the companies that run the ships, but they are also the lines of a poem, which glide forward in much the same unhurried way. The poem is about tourism as a kind of consumption. Passengers are shipped from place to place to watch other people live, and the people being watched are the entertainment.
The opening line sets the tone: "ships full of plague and pleasure." The two nouns share a sound, a heavy *p* and a *l*, so they feel like partners rather than opposites. The line suggests that the pleasure and the sickness arrive in the same hold. The poem doesn't say whether "plague" means literal disease or something broader, such as the damage a crowd does to a place. That openness is useful, because it lets the word hang over the whole poem as a quiet accusation. The ships, not the people, are the grammatical subjects, and they are "full," like containers.
Then comes the strangest phrase: "take their meat people all about." The ships take "their meat people," and the word "meat" strips the passengers down to bodies, something like livestock or cargo being moved around. The reader is invited to see the tourists as the poem sees them, as lumps of appetite carried from port to port. The phrasing is also slightly off. "Meat people" reads like a coinage, and "all about" is casual, almost childish, as though the ships were wandering without a plan. The line is heavy with stressed syllables ("meat people" lands almost like two hammer blows), so it feels thicker and slower than the neat first line.
The second stanza changes pace. The lines get shorter, and the sentence that began with the ships finally reaches its purpose: "to see these others / loving and industrious / for entertainment." The "others" are never named, and that vagueness is deliberate. They are simply whoever happens to live where the ships stop. The adjectives chosen for them are revealing. "Loving and industrious" sounds like the voice of a nature documentary describing bees or ants, or like a brochure praising the "hardworking, friendly locals." These are the qualities a visitor admires in a place without having to share its labour. The people on shore are really living, loving and working, while the people on board are "meat" that only watches. The poem sets up a quiet reversal: the ones treated as scenery are the ones with a full life.
The final phrase, "for entertainment," does the most with the least. It is the longest word in the poem and also the flattest. It arrives with no exclamation and no explanation, like a line on a price list. The poem doesn't lecture, and it never says "this is wrong." It lets the plain bureaucratic phrase stand as the verdict. The grammar helps too. Because there is no full stop anywhere, the poem is a single sentence, one long voyage from ship to shore, and there is no pause where the reader could look away from the idea.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Bonta relies on sound patterns (the *p* of "plague and pleasure," the soft, rounded sounds of "loving and industrious") and on line length to control the pace. The lowercase, unpunctuated style gives the poem a deadpan, overheard feel, as if someone were describing the scene to themselves.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much critique it packs into so few words, and how it implicates the reader. Almost everyone has been, or hopes to be, a visitor somewhere. By calling the travellers "meat people" and the locals "others," the poem makes us look at the arrangement from outside, and the view is not flattering. It leaves one uncomfortable question: when we go to see how other people live, what exactly are we taking from them?