Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to stage a small disaster. The speaker admits, "I fear making friends," and explains the fear with a picture from a farmyard: a hog loose in "a little home field," running over a rose. We might expect a poem about fear of rejection, of being hurt. This one reverses that. The speaker casts himself as the clumsy animal, not the delicate flower. What he dreads is his own capacity to do damage to something precious, and so he stays away.
The grammar backs this up. "Like a hog" attaches to "making friends," so the fear is of making friends in a hog's manner, heavily and without noticing what lies underfoot. The phrase "run over the rose" is ambiguous in a useful way. It can mean the hog runs over the rose, or that the hog has already done it. In both readings the rose is lost. The remaining clause, "which I thought / a wonder," is in the past tense, so the wonder is something judged and then wrecked, or something valued only in hindsight. The poem never says whether the rose is a particular friend, a friendship, or some tender part of the speaker himself, and I think it is stronger for not saying.
That openness is where the title does its work. "Self-neglect" sounds like a phrase from a care report, cold and administrative. Set against the farmyard image, it suggests that the speaker's avoidance of people is not noble self-restraint but a failure to look after himself. He protects others from his clumsiness by depriving himself of company. The title turns a gentle-sounding precaution into something closer to a charge against himself.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation at all, and two tercets of very short lines. The missing full stop matters. The poem never closes, which suits a fear that is still going on. The line breaks do quiet work too. "Like a hog in" ends on one of the smallest words in the language, leaving the reader stranded for a beat before dropping into "a little home field." That field is cramped, domestic, and enclosed, and putting a hog in it explains the fear in a single image. In so small a space, anything large is bound to be destructive. The mismatch in scale carries the speaker's self-image: too big, too coarse, too close to everything breakable. "Home field" is also a sporting phrase for where a player ought to have the advantage, and the poem may be turning that idea upside down, though that is an inference.
Sound ties the destroyer and the destroyed together. "Hog," "home," "over" and "rose" keep returning to the same round vowel, and "over the rose" is nearly a chime, as though the two things cannot be said apart. The diction is plain and bodily until the last line, where "wonder" arrives as the only word with any elevation. Breaking "which I thought" from "a wonder" makes the reader pause where the speaker once paused in admiration. The poem ends on the value of what was lost, not on the damage, and that is why the loss stings.
The poem is also significant for what it declines to do. It does not ask for sympathy, and it flatters nobody. The self it paints is unglamorous, a hog and not a wounded poet, and the honesty is disarming. Because the poem offers no verdict, the reader has to decide whether the fear is justified. Perhaps the speaker really has trampled something beautiful. Or perhaps the hog exists only in his imagination, and the real harm is the friendships that never begin. The poem holds both possibilities open, and in six lines it asks whether caution toward others can itself be a way of hurting oneself.