Most definitions of privilege list what it gives you. Dave Bonta's poem is more interested in what it lets you avoid. In four short couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, it sketches a figure who travels into the world of the poor and returns unmarked. The central idea is that privilege is a kind of mobility: you can go out, come back, and keep your hands clean. The poem also suspects the motives behind that mobility.
The mole is the first and strangest choice. Moles live underground, dig through dirt, and are famously solitary, so the image sets up a creature at home in the dark and the muck. English also uses "mole" for a spy, someone who burrows into a group that is not his own and reports back. The second line, "out and back again," fits both senses. This is a round trip, not a life lived below. Whoever the mole stands for, he can always return to where he came from, and the poem makes that look like a freedom the poor don't have.
Then comes "no other company / but an ugly wish." Bonta never says what the wish is, and the gap is deliberate. The reader fills it in: a wish to be needed, to feel virtuous, to look at poverty and go home satisfied, or perhaps simply to be somewhere else. "Ugly" is the one blunt judgment in a poem otherwise made of images, and it falls on the speaker's own inner life. The company he keeps is a private motive, not other people, which makes his visit lonelier and more self-regarding than it first appears.
The third couplet brings a cruelly funny simile: "hands clean / as hats on Sunday." Hats on Sunday are for show, put on for church and for being seen, so cleanliness becomes a matter of respectability and not of innocence. The line also quietly contradicts the mole. A digging animal with spotless paws is an absurdity, and that absurdity is the joke. Someone who has supposedly been among the dirt and the poor has somehow come back with nothing on him. The short, clipped "hands clean" even sounds tidy, and the repeated *h* in "hands" and "hats" gives the line a prim, brushed-off feel.
The final couplet is the most open. "at home with the poor" can be read as the speaker's claim to feel comfortable among poor people, a self-flattering ease. But the line break lets "people out" arrive as a separate thought. It could be a description (the poor people are out, not at home), a command (poor people, out), or a half-heard phrase about being put out. Each reading gives a different shade of the same problem. In one, the speaker is "at home" only because the people he claims kinship with are absent. In another, "home" is exactly what the poor are shut out of. The poem lets all of them stand, and that uncertainty is part of its unease.
Formally, the poem avoids anything neat. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, uneven lines that break where thought breaks. The couplets feel like paired glimpses rather than a developing argument. The lack of punctuation means that phrases like "hands clean" and "people out" hang loose and can attach to what comes before or after. There is a faint structural echo, too: the poem opens on "out" and closes on "out," but the "back again" of the second line never returns. The movement that began as a round trip ends on exclusion.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it preaches. It never says privilege is wrong or tells the reader what to feel. It gives a mole, a wish, a pair of clean hands, and an ambiguous last line, and lets the reader notice the discomfort. It is also a poem that implicates whoever reads it comfortably, because anyone who can stroll in and out of hardship might recognise the clean hands as their own.