to perform an action that is likely to provoke a severe reaction from the one being metaphorically touched, a person who wields meaningful power; akin to entering the den of a hibernating bear and rousting it from its pleasant slumber, upon which it will direct its fury at being disturbed towards the intruder; this term can be deployed to caution someone against heedless behavior, as in: “We know how sensitive the boss is about uptime so let’s not bring up the website outage again, we don’t want to poke the bear”