Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Disaster junkie" gets to be an innocent bystander. The opening line says so with a wry shrug: "we feign innocence." The verb matters. To feign is to act, so the innocence is a performance, and the poem sets out to puncture it in nine short lines. The speaker steps forward in line two with "but I have read / the history of the weather" and knows too much to pretend. Storms, floods and droughts are not freak surprises. They have a record, and the speaker has been studying it.
"History of the weather" is the poem's quiet joke and its quiet threat. Weather is usually what happens today, the small talk of the moment. Giving it a history makes it something with a long memory and a pattern, almost a character with a past. The phrase also fits the title. A junkie does not try a substance once. A junkie keeps going back, and reading about catastrophe account after account is exactly that kind of habit. The poem never says which disaster it means, and the vagueness helps. It could be a hurricane on the news, a changing climate, or the whole accumulating archive of bad weather.
The second stanza turns the finger inward. "I fear to leave off" is a telling confession, because what frightens the speaker is stopping, not the disaster itself, and that is the mark of real compulsion. Then comes the deflation of "though I find myself / full of wind." The line break after "myself" offers a moment of solemn self-discovery, and what the speaker discovers is a joke. Wind belongs to weather, so the image fits the poem's world. But "full of wind" is also the idiom for bluster and empty talk. Having read so much, the speaker is bloated with information, and perhaps with self-importance, and has nothing useful to do with it. Knowledge here does not protect anyone. It only inflates.
The last stanza widens from "I" back to "we" and delivers the central idea: "the very wonders / that we ah at / do us in." The invented verb "ah at" is the most memorable piece of language in the poem. "Ah" is an interjection, a noise, and turning it into a verb with a preposition gives us the gasp of a crowd looking up at a lightning storm. It captures the delight, and the thoughtlessness, of watching. Then "do us in" arrives, colloquial and flat, refusing to dress up the consequence. "The very" tightens the irony: the same things that amaze us are the things that finish us. The poem leaves open what those wonders are. They might be nature's spectacles, such as storms and surges. Given the "history of the weather," they might equally be our own marvels, the engines and appetites that change the weather in the first place. The text supports both readings, and the ambiguity is part of its force.
The construction is spare. There are three tercets, no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters apart from the pronoun "I," so the poem reads like one unbroken thought. Most lines run three to five syllables, which makes the seven-syllable "the history of the weather" the longest by a distance, as if the weight of the record lands there. After that the stanzas end on shorter, blunter lines: "full of wind," "do us in." Each is a small drop, and the second drop is the harder one. Sound ties the stanzas together too. "We," "weather," "wind," "wonders" and "we" again make a quiet w-chain that links the human group to the thing that threatens it. The missing full stop at the end leaves the poem open, like a habit that has not ended.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It accuses the reader of a pleasure we rarely admit, the thrill of watching things go wrong, and it implicates the speaker first. It does not preach. It mocks itself ("full of wind") and lets the humor make the warning easier to hear. Awe and appetite turn out to be the same impulse, and the poem asks what it costs to keep indulging it.