Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Commission by Attrition" is a poem of movement, commerce, and the disembodied experience of constant travel. It is a piece that operates on both a literal and metaphysical level, capturing the relentless motion of business trips and the existential weightlessness of a life spent between airports, rental cars, and fleeting transactions. Hicok’s language is fluid and frenetic, mirroring the dizzying pace of modern work culture and the emotional attrition that comes with it.

The poem begins with a rhetorical question that reorients gravity from a scientific force to an emotional one: "Who’s to say gravity isn’t love?" This inversion sets the tone for a meditation on the paradox of modern existence—where human connection is reduced to transactional moments, and the speaker clings to the small comforts available in a life of perpetual displacement. The opening lines establish this instability with humor: "The landing was gracious, my jigsaw body intact but with all the honey-roasted peanuts I could fit in my pockets and this is embrace." Here, survival and affection are intertwined—the speaker’s "jigsaw body" suggests both fragmentation and resilience, while hoarding airplane snacks becomes a stand-in for self-care in a world that offers little else.

Hicok immediately propels us into the repetitive cycle of travel, a life defined by fuel consumption and interchangeable cars: "This is 10,000 gallons of fuel to fly from one rental car to another, white Saturn, blue Sable." There is no sense of place, only movement, and the speaker’s consciousness reflects this restlessness, shifting between sky and ground, between images of "Mickey Mantle at the plate" and "Mick at the bar with highball." The fleeting nature of perception mirrors the speaker’s own transient existence—his world is a series of rapidly changing landscapes, none of which provide real grounding.

The imagery that follows—mountains "colonizing the sky," rivers "slinking off," cityscapes "crenellated"—reinforces a sense of distance and impermanence. The speaker himself is reduced to an entity in transit, his hotel room arriving before him, as if he is merely an afterthought to his own life: "Someone’s Fed-Exed my hotel room, it arrives before me, premonition of comfy mattress, window facing fire escape." The irony of this moment—comfort as something external and impersonal—underscores the poem’s deeper theme of disconnection.

Hicok then shifts into an associative riff on machinery, industry, and the sales pitch, blending corporate jargon with an almost poetic reverence for mechanical components: "I tell the story of gaskets, there’s drama in valves, what they let in, keep out." Here, the poet plays on the idea that even the smallest objects—gaskets, valves, filters—carry existential weight, controlling the flow of life’s essentials. The notion that "if air’s just what it is and not what you tell it to be" extends this metaphor to the broader human condition. The lack of filtration, the removal of safety mechanisms, suggests vulnerability, chaos, and ultimately death—an idea sharpened by the mention of "Amber’s mouth," a child who "might not reach the prom" due to some failure in the system. This dark interjection highlights the stakes behind all these seemingly mundane transactions.

The poem moves seamlessly between the mechanical and the bodily, drawing a parallel between the expendability of machine parts and the speaker’s own physical decline: "Who’s to say my body isn’t sacrifice, burger burger burger, what’s a colon after all but temporary, some blood in the stool, some insomnia for my Amy." The repetition of "burger burger burger" suggests both consumer excess and personal deterioration, while "some insomnia for my Amy" adds a moment of tenderness—perhaps referencing a loved one left behind, someone who suffers the consequences of his restless life.

By the time the speaker declares, "I come here and here is not here, there’s no place I ever am and this is falling," the poem has fully embraced its existential weight. The perpetual motion has stripped the speaker of any real sense of presence, reducing existence to an abstracted, locationless state. The final lines—"my soul’s at the airport, my body was sent to Dallas, I gave up luggage for Lent and carry my toothbrush in my useless chest."—are a culmination of the poem’s central themes. The body and soul are separated, destinations are arbitrary, and even the basic acts of self-care (such as carrying a toothbrush) are rendered absurd in the face of total displacement.

Structurally, Hicok’s poem mirrors its subject matter—long, unpunctuated stretches of thought mimic the breathless pace of travel, while enjambment reinforces the feeling of momentum. The lines cascade forward without pause, much like the speaker’s relentless movement from one location to another. The shifting tones—humor, absurdity, exhaustion, and existential dread—coalesce into a voice that is at once weary and self-aware, capturing the absurdity of a life spent in transit.

Ultimately, "Commission by Attrition" is a critique of corporate modernity and the way it erodes individual agency. The title itself suggests both the process of being worn down over time and the transactional nature of existence in a capitalist framework. The poem captures the exhaustion of a life spent in motion, where people become interchangeable, love is reduced to a passing thought, and even the body itself is just another temporary component in a system designed for endless consumption.

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