Nine lines would be a generous estimate of what Dave Bonta needs here; he uses six. "Minor romance" is made of three unpunctuated couplets, and it still manages to hold a grievance, a consolation and a quiet threat. The title sets the key. "Minor" suggests something small or unimportant, but it also suggests a musical minor key, the sound of sadness. The poem is both: a small love affair, played in a sombre register.
The first couplet, "a catalogue of ash / for my trouble", opens with an idiom turned sour. "For my trouble" is what you say when you expect a reward for effort, and here the payment is ash. A catalogue is a list of things you could choose from, yet this one contains only what is left after burning. The word hints at a love that has been used up, and perhaps at a speaker keeping careful records of the damage. The poem doesn't say what burned, so the reader has to decide whether this is the ash of a relationship, of a body or of hope.
The second couplet answers the first. "A story of love / for a bad bad world" is offered as if in exchange, because the line again starts with "for". The doubled "bad bad" sounds almost like a child's word for the world, or the voice you use to soothe someone, and the three stresses falling together in "for a bad bad world" make the line heavy and slow. Yet the tone is not simply bitter. Love is presented as a story, something made and handed over, rather than a fact. Judging by the wording, the speaker doesn't claim love will fix anything. It is a modest offering to something that doesn't deserve even that.
The last couplet shifts the grammar. The first two couplets have no verbs at all; they are noun phrases, like labels or items in an inventory. Only now do we get "will shake" and "lie", and the poem moves into the future tense. The articles matter too: the catalogue and the story are "a" catalogue and "a" story, indefinite and small, while "the hierarchy" is definite and singular, an established thing. The word is deliberately broad. It could be a social order, a church, a government or any system that ranks people, and the poem leaves it unspecific.
The final line, "as we lie below", is where the poem becomes most ambiguous. The lovers are literally lying down, which gives the poem its erotic undertone, and the hierarchy "shakes" with something like the rhythm of that act, or like an earthquake. But "below" also puts the speakers at the bottom of the order, among the powerless. It can also suggest the ground, so that "lie below" reads as lying buried, which would echo the ash in the first couplet. And "lie" carries a faint pun on untruth, especially after a "story". The poem doesn't resolve these readings. It may be saying that the ones at the bottom, whether in love or in the grave, are the ones who shake the structure above them, or it may be a quieter, sadder claim that the powerful will tremble only after the lovers are gone. Both are possible, and the lack of punctuation lets them sit together.
Sound ties the pieces together. "Ash" and "shake" share their soft sh, linking the first and last couplets so that the ending seems to remember the burnt beginning. The l-sounds in "love", "world", "lie" and "below" give the closing couplets a soft, lulling thread, which suits a poem that talks about stories and comfort. There is no rhyme and no fixed metre, but the lines are short and fall naturally on one to three stresses, so each phrase lands with the weight of a spoken remark.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it declines to say. It doesn't name the lovers, the loss or the powers above them, and it relies on the contrast between the small things offered (ash, a story) and the large thing threatened (a hierarchy). The title's word "minor" turns out to be the poem's argument: small, private acts of love, set against a "bad bad world", are given the unlikely power to make the whole structure shake.