Dave Bonta's "Consumer affairs" is eight lines of deadpan confession that sounds like a shopping label. Its title is a pun. "Consumer affairs" suggests complaint desks and product standards, but "affairs" also means the secret entanglements people have behind other people's backs. The poem sits in the gap between those meanings. Love is being described as though it were something on a shelf, and the description is not flattering.
The first couplet reads like a blurb. "My love is thin / but full of variety" borrows the language of advertising, where "variety" is always a selling point. But the sentence turns on "but," and the two halves contradict each other. Thin is the opposite of full, and the speaker admits to a love that is slight in depth and abundant only in choice. The line can be read as boasting or as an apology, and it is funny because the speaker seems unable to tell which. Variety might mean many partners, many moods, or a restless inability to settle, and the poem never says. That refusal to explain gives the opening its dry, uncomfortable humour.
The second couplet breaks down the grammar. "o divert us at the office" begins with a lowercase "o." It may be an invocation, a prayer-like cry in the manner of old love poetry, or it may be a clipped or slipped "to." Either way, the line makes sense both ways. As a plea ("o, divert us"), it asks for entertainment at the one place where entertainment is forbidden. As a purpose ("to divert us"), it explains what the variety is for. "Divert" is the key word here. It means to amuse, but it also means to turn something aside from its proper course. Love, in this poem, is a diversion in both senses, a pastime that sends us off our path. Setting it in "the office" adds the world of work, schedules and colleagues, so the word "affairs" in the title starts to hint at workplace romance.
The final line, "my eyes bad in bed," drops the verb altogether, as if the speaker were jotting down symptoms. The line works on several levels. Bad eyes could mean poor vision, so the speaker cannot even see the person beside him. They could be wandering eyes, restless and unfaithful. They could suggest eyes that are tired, or that behave badly even in the most private place. This is the one line set outside the working day, and it is also the bluntest. Having started in the language of commerce, the poem ends in the bedroom with a short, flat admission. The sound of the line helps. "Bad" and "bed" are near twins, and the short "i" of "in" echoes the "thin" from the first line, which gives the ending a small, neat closure.
There is no end rhyme and no punctuation, and the lines are of uneven length. The shortest are the opening and closing lines, "my love is thin" and "my eyes bad in bed," and both begin with "my." They frame the poem with a personal claim and keep it from becoming a general statement about modern life. Between them, the longer lines ("but full of variety," "o divert us at the office") swell and then shrink again, so the shape of the poem is also thin, then full, then thin. Whether or not that was intended, it fits the theme.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It does not preach about consumer culture or lecture us about shallow relationships. It lets the vocabulary of buying and selling leak into a confession of love, so that readers can feel the awkwardness themselves. The tone is comic, but it leaves something sour behind, since the speaker's variety and diversions add up to a thin love, and he seems to know it. Because the poem leaves out so much, from the verbs to any explanation, readers have to supply the story. Most will probably find the same sad joke in it, that a life full of choices can still be a poor one.