Dave Bonta's short poem defines punk rock in three quick, unsettling images. First, it is "a rough draft of the news / to play on guitar": music that takes the day's headlines and turns them into something loud and unpolished, before anyone has had time to smooth them over. The word "draft" suggests urgency, as if the song has to get out before the facts are even settled.
The second and third stanzas shift to something darker and more mysterious. The "soul" of punk is pictured as a "rabble of killed children," a crowd of the dead who somehow "heard the world / in last night's rain." The image is hard to pin down, but it suggests voices that are young, angry, and cut short, listening to the world in something as ordinary as rain falling. The speaker seems to feel both admiration and grief. The mood is raw, haunted, and tender underneath the noise, as though punk's rage comes from sorrow.