Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Dropping the Euphemism" is a raw, unsettling meditation on the act of firing someone—stripped of the corporate language that usually distances people from the brutal reality of job loss. The poem confronts the human cost of economic decisions, exploring the disconnect between those who make these decisions and those who suffer their consequences. Through dark humor, fragmented imagery, and psychological depth, Hicok captures the existential weight of taking away another person’s livelihood, exposing the ways in which both employer and employee are irrevocably altered by the experience.

The poem begins with a stark contrast between the speaker and the man he must fire: “He has five children, I’m papa / to a hundred pencils.” This juxtaposition immediately highlights the imbalance between the two men—the fired worker has real, living responsibilities, while the speaker’s "children" are mere office supplies, inanimate objects that reflect his detachment from family life. The humor here is dry and ironic, but it also sets up a deeper tension: the speaker's work world is defined by the trivial and replaceable, whereas the worker’s reality is grounded in the undeniable needs of his children.

The speaker then introduces the absurdity of his office environment: “I bought the chair he sat in / from a book of chairs, / staplers and spikes / that let me play Vlad the Impaler / with invading memos.” The mention of "a book of chairs" suggests a dehumanizing, mass-produced workplace culture, where even the furniture lacks individuality. The reference to "Vlad the Impaler" injects a darkly comic sense of cruelty—though the speaker wields only staplers and office supplies, the metaphor aligns him with historical brutality. This self-awareness adds an undercurrent of guilt: he knows that, in a different way, he too is enacting violence.

The firing itself is captured in a single, devastating moment: “When I said / I have to lay you off / a parallel universe was born / in his face.” The phrase "parallel universe" suggests that, in an instant, the worker’s entire reality has shifted. The life he knew—structured, predictable—has collapsed, replaced by something alien and terrifying. Hicok extends this image with painful precision: “one where flesh / is a loose shirt / taken to the river and beaten / against rocks.” This violent, almost biblical metaphor emphasizes the worker’s sudden vulnerability—his sense of self, once stable, is now battered and worn.

The next lines cut to the psychological core of the moment: “Just / by opening my mouth I destroyed / his faith he’s a man.” The firing is not just an economic event—it is an assault on the worker’s identity. Hicok zeroes in on the intimate, often unspoken connection between work and masculinity, between employment and the ability to provide. The phrase “who can think honey-glazed ham / and act out the thought / with plastic or bills” encapsulates this loss in a painfully mundane way. The ability to envision a simple meal and then buy it with earned money is a fundamental marker of agency. Now, even that small certainty is gone.

As they sit in the office, the atmosphere becomes unbearable: “We sat. / I stared at my hands, he stared / at the wall staring at my hands.” The repetition and circularity of this moment capture the suffocating awkwardness of loss—the emptiness that follows words that cannot be undone. The speaker tries to fill this void with platitudes: “I said other things / about the excellent work he’d done / and the cycles of business / which are like / the roller-coaster thoughts / of an oscilloscope.” The comparison of economic cycles to an "oscilloscope"—a machine that measures fluctuating electrical waves—underscores the impersonal, technical justifications for layoffs. These words, though meant to soften the blow, only highlight the randomness of it all.

Then, in a moment of poetic brilliance, the speaker turns to the worker’s wife: “All this time / I saw the eyes of his wife / which had always been brown / like almonds but were now brown / like the crust of bread.” This transformation of her eyes—from something rich and whole (almonds) to something hardened and barely sustaining (bread crust)—is a stunningly subtle metaphor for what this loss means. It is not just the worker who suffers; the weight of this decision extends to his family, to the woman who will now have to make do with less.

The departure itself is painfully human: “We walked / to the door, I shook his hand, / felt the bones pretending / to be strong.” The phrase "bones pretending to be strong" captures the silent dignity of the fired worker—his body language insists on resilience, even as everything inside him is collapsing.

The poem then follows him outside, imagining his world unraveling in real time: “On his way home / there was a happy song / because de Sade invented radio.” The invocation of the Marquis de Sade—famed for his philosophy of cruelty—implies that even the simple act of hearing a cheerful song on the radio is a cruel joke, a sadistic irony against the backdrop of this devastating moment.

The imagery that follows is heartbreaking: “The window was open, he saw / delphinium but couldn’t remember / the name.” The loss of a job disrupts even the most fundamental cognitive connections—the ability to name things, to recall simple beauty, is overshadowed by economic fear.

Hicok then shifts to the darkest possibility: “Maybe at each exit / that could have led his body / to Tempe, to Mars, he was tempted / to forget his basketball team / of sons.” The phrasing here is chilling—each exit becomes a potential escape, each road a temptation to abandon responsibility. The phrase "to forget his basketball team / of sons" suggests a moment of despair where the weight of family obligations, once motivating, now feels like unbearable pressure.

The poem then reflects on the fundamental survival instinct: “Running’s natural to most animals / who aren’t part / of a lecture series on Nature’s / Dead Ends.” This grim humor highlights the contradiction: humans, unlike animals, are trapped in social and economic constructs that make escape impossible.

The speaker, haunted by the event, imagines the worker’s mental retreat: “When I told him, / I saw he was looking for a place / in his brain to hide / his brain.” The recursive phrasing (“his brain to hide his brain”) perfectly encapsulates trauma—the desperate, futile attempt to find mental refuge from something that cannot be escaped.

The poem ends with the speaker turning to alcohol: “I tried that later / with beer, it worked until I stood / at the toilet to make my little / waterfall, and thought of him / pushing back from a bar / to go make the same noise.” The irony is brutal—the only temporary relief from guilt is found in drinking, yet even this most basic bodily function ties him back to the man he has laid off. Both are reduced to the same meaningless act, their lives briefly aligned in the shared absurdity of existence.

Hicok’s "Dropping the Euphemism" is a masterful exploration of guilt, masculinity, and the cruelty of economic systems that treat jobs as numbers rather than lifelines. The poem does not seek to justify or redeem the speaker’s role in the layoff—it simply records the moment in all its excruciating humanity. By dropping euphemisms, by stripping away corporate language, Hicok forces us to confront the raw emotional and existential weight of unemployment. The loss of a job, in this poem, is not just a bureaucratic decision; it is a dismantling of identity, a rupture in the fragile narrative of a man’s life.

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