"Evilification" sounds like a word a committee would invent, and the clumsiness is deliberate. The suffix turns evil into a procedure, something done to a person rather than something a person is. Dave Bonta's short poem follows that procedure step by step: from hate, to silence, to erasure, to a strange emptiness at the end.
It opens with an abstraction: "hate in the abstract / contracts into a tired road." The verb "contracts" does two jobs. It means to shrink, and the poem does shrink a vast, shapeless emotion into one narrow, worn-out path. It also carries the sense of an agreement signed, as if hatred, once it settles, becomes a deal we keep. "Tired" is the telling word. The road is not dangerous or dramatic, only overused, and that suggests hatred as habit rather than passion.
The second stanza brings in "we," which pulls the speaker and the reader into the picture. "And we shut up" is blunt and colloquial. It could be self-silencing or obedience, and the poem does not say which. Then comes "unthank," a coinage that reverses gratitude, as though the speakers refuse to acknowledge whatever the road has given them. Its object is "the dust riding us," and the reversal matters. We would expect people to ride a road, not dust to ride people. Here the grime of the journey sits on our backs like a rider. Sound reinforces the weight: "shut," "dust" and "us" repeat the same dull, thudding vowel, so the stanza seems to clump to a halt.
The middle stanza is the sharpest. "No news / is what what we have done / to the enemy." The proverb "no news is good news" is turned inside out. Here no news is not a comfort but an act, something done to someone. The enemy is made invisible by being left unreported and unspoken. The doubled "what what," as it appears here, makes the speaker stammer, as if the admission is hard to get out. Whether the stutter is intended or not, it slows the line at the moment of confession, and the slowing is effective.
The ending refuses to resolve. "But that the enemy own / little purpose" breaks ordinary grammar. "Own" lacks the expected "s," and the sentence stops without punctuation. The phrase "but that" can mean "except that," so the thought may be that erasing the enemy leaves the enemy with almost nothing to be for. The line break leaves "own" hanging alone for a moment, which invites a second reading, something like owning up. The poem allows both. Judging by the earlier imagery of a tired road and dust on our backs, the emptied enemy may mirror the emptied speakers. If hatred needs an enemy to have a purpose, then a hollowed-out enemy leaves the haters hollow too. That is an inference, but the shared "we" and the burden of dust encourage it.
Structurally the poem is spare. It has four stanzas of two, two, three and two lines, all in lowercase with no punctuation. There is no rhyme, only faint echoes such as "dust" and "us," or the long "o" of "road" and "own," which bracket the poem like distant bookends. Without full stops the sentences slide into each other, and the short lines make the reader supply the links. That fits the subject, since the poem is about how much gets left unsaid.
The poem's significance lies in this economy. It names no particular enemy and no particular conflict, so it can apply to any case where a person or group is first turned into an abstraction and then into a silence. The abstract nouns, the coined words and the proverb twisted into an accusation show language doing the work of dehumanizing, quietly, before anything louder happens. Because the grammar breaks off at the end, the reader is left with the poem's problem unfinished, and has to decide who is left holding the purpose that has been drained away.