Dave Bonta's "Outcast" is built around a strange, tender joke: a word treated as if it were something you could throw away, wear, or swallow. The title is itself the word being addressed, and the speaker begins by commanding it to be cast out, which is exactly what "outcast" already means. The word is being punished by its own meaning.
Then the poem shifts. The word becomes "like a hat," something ordinary and worn, and then something the speaker eats "at night without any company." That image is lonely and a little odd. The speaker has taken the rejected thing inside, as if the only one left to keep the word company is the person who banished it. By the final line, "poor word," the commanding tone has softened into pity.
The mood is quiet, wry, and sad. The speaker seems to feel the loneliness the word describes, and the poem suggests that casting something out and consuming it may be closer than they first appear.