Nobody in Dave Bonta's "News junkie" is in charge, least of all the speaker. In six short lines, the familiar habit of compulsively following the news becomes a scene on a farm, and the unsettling part is that the speaker asks for it. Every verb is an instruction given to the news, yet each one leaves the speaker passive: informed, disordered, pointed toward bed. The poem is a plea dressed up as a set of commands.
The opening is deliberately incomplete: "news like a prize hog / or someone with my carcass." There is no verb, no capital letter and no punctuation, so the sentence hangs open like an appetite that hasn't been satisfied. The most natural reading is that the speaker wants to be treated by the news the way a prize hog is treated, or the way "someone" treats a carcass. That someone seems to be a butcher. A second reading makes the news itself the gorging hog, with the speaker as what is left over. The poem doesn't choose between them, and it doesn't need to. A hog is fattened and then killed, and a carcass is what remains, so the two words hold a whole life cycle between them. "Prize" adds a sly note of flattery, because being stuffed feels like being rewarded. "Carcass" then lands with a blunt, almost comic thud, reducing the speaker's body to meat.
The second stanza tightens into "inform me / disorder me." The two verbs are near mirror images. "Inform" comes from giving something form, and "disorder" takes order away. They even share a sound, the "or" in the middle of each, so they feel like twins. The news promises to make sense of the world, yet it leaves the mind more scrambled than before. The speaker asks for both in the same breath, without exclamation marks or complaint, and that is exactly the junkie's logic: what the supply does matters less than the fact that it keeps coming.
The word "me" also deserves attention. It ends three lines ("inform me," "disorder me," "point me"), and since the poem has no end-rhyme in the usual sense, this repetition acts as a rhyme of its own. It also marks the grammar of the whole poem. There is no "I" anywhere, only "me" and "my." The speaker never acts and is only acted upon.
The rhythm supports this. The first stanza runs to five and six syllables a line, and then the lines shrink to three and four, as quick and clipped as headlines. The final stanza slows down. "And at night" begins with a conjunction, as if the news simply carries on from one thing to the next, and the day has no other organizing principle. Then comes "point me to bed." "Point" is what a farmer does when herding an animal toward its pen, so the bed quietly becomes a sty and the hog from the first line comes back. The poem ends on a single flat syllable, "bed," like a door closing.
The ending is both funny and a little sad. The one decision a person might reasonably make alone, that it's time to stop and sleep, has been handed over to the thing that kept the speaker awake. The speaker doesn't say they are tired. They wait to be directed, as livestock are.
The poem is significant for its compression and its refusal to lecture. It offers no statistics, no scolding and no advice to switch off. Instead, it speaks in the voice of someone who has already surrendered, which makes the joke implicate the reader. Anyone who has gone on reading long after the reading stopped being useful will recognize the voice. The poem also enacts what it describes. By withholding a verb in its first line, it leaves the reader to fill the gap, just as the news leaves us always reaching for the next thing. In six lines, with almost no ornament, the poem makes a modern habit look like an old and rather undignified arrangement: one party feeds, and the other grows heavy and obedient.