A man is fitted for a suit, and six lines later he is carrying a rat home for supper. Dave Bonta's "Congressman" squeezes a whole career into that short distance. The speaker is a politician who calmly agrees to a life of "business with loss and war," and the poem lets us watch what that bargain does to him.
The opening command, "measure me for a black suit," works on two levels. Black is the colour of formal office and the colour of funerals, and the poem never chooses between them. The suit is also "full of yesterday's pleasure," a strange, faintly sour phrase. A suit is something you wear, not something that holds things, so the image suggests clothing stuffed with spent enjoyments, stale and secondhand. "Yesterday" suggests the pleasure is already used up. The speaker is putting on a uniform that is partly a shroud. "Measure" also means to judge someone's worth, so the request for a fitting hints at a character being sized up. There is a quiet sound-game here as well. "Measure" opens the first line and "pleasure" closes the second, and the two words rhyme perfectly. They sit at opposite ends of the couplet, so the echo is easy to miss. Nothing else in the poem rhymes, which makes this faint chime stand out as a link between being judged and being indulged.
The second stanza turns from the wardrobe to the job. "I shall do business" has the formal ring of a vow, and I read it as a faint parody of an oath of office, though that is an inference from the tone. The verb choice matters more. "Business" is a flat, commercial word, and the things being traded are "loss and war," two huge abstractions placed side by side with no adjectives and no hint of outrage. The speaker treats them as goods to be handled, which is where the poem's coldness comes from. He sounds like a man discussing quarterly figures.
Then the poem shrinks from the enormous to the tiny. "Till my eyes begin to fail" reads most simply as old age, but it also suggests a man who will keep working until he can no longer see, and perhaps one who has chosen not to look already. The grammar adds to the effect. "Begin to fail" is followed almost at once by "begin to take a rat," and the repeated "begin" makes the second event feel like a symptom of the first. As the sight goes, the standards go with it.
The final image is the poem's most unsettling and its most open. A rat taken "home to supper" could be a guest, a meal or a pet, and the poem doesn't say which. The word "rat" also carries its slang sense of a betrayer, so the speaker may simply be dining with his own kind. The line break helps. "Rat" ends its line alone for a moment before the cosy, domestic "home to supper" arrives, and the contrast between vermin and teatime manners is darkly comic. After the vast words "loss" and "war," the poem ends at a kitchen table, so the public damage is shown as a private decline.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse in two short stanzas, two lines and then four, and its diction is plain and mostly one syllable. The only capital letter is the pronoun "I," and there is no punctuation at all. With no full stop to close it, the poem ends mid-motion, and the rat is still on its way home.
The poem's significance lies in its restraint. It doesn't lecture or shout. It gives the speaker a calm, almost cheerful voice and lets him incriminate himself, which is how persona poems often make their satire sharper. The title names a type rather than a particular person, so the poem works as a portrait of what a certain kind of public life might do to someone. For a reader, it shows how much a few carefully chosen images can do: a black suit, a failing eye and a rat at supper tell a complete story of corruption.