Five short lines are enough to put a tyrant on the page, and what makes him frightening is how small he sounds. The speaker begins with "not good about letting others speak", a phrase you might expect on a school report about a pupil who talks over classmates. Applied to a dictator, the understatement chills. Silencing other people becomes a mild social failing, the kind of thing one admits with a shrug. The line also has no subject. The "I" only arrives in the next line, as if the speaker slides past himself while describing his faults.
From there the poem turns into an apology, built on the repeated formula "I am sorry for". Ordinarily an apology points toward change. This one is only an inventory of what the speaker is: "the ice in my head / and heart full of decay". The two images work against each other. Ice is hard, cold and fixed, and it suggests a mind frozen in one position that nothing new can enter, which fits a man who will not let others speak. Decay is the opposite process, slow rot and a feeling organ spoiling. Head and heart are therefore ruined in opposite ways. The grammar slips as well. "My" is missing before "heart", so the second line seems to tack the heart on as an afterthought. We can read it as two separate sorrows or as one blurred condition, with ice and rot sharing a single body. The speaker never says he will thaw or heal.
Then comes the object. "This gun" has a demonstrative that puts the weapon in the room, perhaps in his hand, in the present tense. The earlier faults were inner and abstract. This one is physical and, by implication, still within reach. The final line, "which makes the hole of power", is the poem's strangest. We expect a gun to hold power, or to make a wound. Instead power is itself the hole. That phrase can suggest a bullet hole, the dark mouth of a barrel, or an emptiness at the centre of the one who rules. The poem doesn't say whose body the hole is in, and that ambiguity is useful. One can also hear "whole" faintly behind "hole", as though power promises completeness and delivers a gap, though that echo is a possibility rather than something the text insists on.
The form carries the same restraint. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the first word is lowercase. The poem ends on "power" without a full stop, so even the last word is left hanging. The lines also shrink, running roughly nine or ten syllables in the first two and about six in each of the last three. The poem seems to narrow toward the gun, as though each admission leaves less room to speak. The vocabulary is almost entirely plain and short ("ice", "head", "gun", "hole"), and the only longer words, "decay" and "power", carry the heaviest ideas. There is a quiet echo between "decay" and "makes", but nothing so musical that it would make the confession sound pretty.
What gives the poem its force is an irony built into its situation. Line one confesses that this man doesn't let others speak, and the poem that follows is a monologue in which no other voice ever appears. We hear only him, listing his sorrows with no addressee and no response. The apology therefore works less as repentance than as one more act of speaking over everyone. He is sorry, and he still has the gun.
Naming no country, era or victim, the poem lets "Dictator" stand for anyone who rules by force. The reader has to supply the silenced people the speaker never mentions. In a few lines it suggests that tyranny is cold and rotten, and that the power it guards is a hole.