Few poems say as much about the body in so few words as "Mob rule" by Dave Bonta. The speaker calls the body a "carcass" he lives and walks in. He means to be rid of it, but by the end the body has the last word, and the title tells us what kind of word it is. The "I" who wants to dispose of the flesh turns out not to be in charge of it.
The first image is brutal and deflating. A carcass is a dead animal, something for butchers or scavengers, yet the speaker "lives and walks" in it. The word makes the body a dwelling, like a coat or a rented room, and that sets up a split between occupant and house. The next line, "common as dirt", is a cliché, but here it does real work. "Common" means ordinary, and it also means shared and belonging to everyone, like a village common. It quietly prepares for the title: a body is not private property but part of a crowd.
The second stanza is a list, and its construction is the cleverest thing in the poem. After "and poor" comes a run of "out of" phrases: "out of wine / out of the way / out of money / out of hand." The repetition builds like a chant, but the meaning drifts as it goes. "Out of wine" and "out of money" are plain shortages. "Out of the way" means remote, but it can also mean tidied aside. "Out of hand" ends the list on loss of control, which is what happens when a mob gets loose. The poem moves from poverty to disorder in four steps without ever raising its voice. The word "wine" may also hint at celebration, or perhaps communion, but that is an inference. What the poem plainly offers is a body that has run dry.
Then comes the wish to escape. "I think of disposing of it / stop seeing it / this fire and flesh." The grammar slips here. There is no "and" or "to" between "disposing of it" and "stop seeing it", so getting rid of the body and no longer looking at it blur into one act. The phrase "fire and flesh" is the poem's one warm moment. Fire suggests energy, appetite and life, and it also suggests burning a corpse. The thought of disposal is left ambiguous. It might be a weary wish to stop being so aware of one's own body, or something darker, and the poem doesn't say. That restraint is part of its power.
The last stanza reverses the whole situation. "But the bones turn / and expose me / for a flock." The bones, the hardest and most hidden part of us, move on their own, and the speaker is the one exposed. "Expose" can mean to reveal, and it can mean to leave something out in the open, unprotected, as carrion is left. "For a flock" can be read as "revealed as a flock": the single "I" turns out to be a crowd, many bones and many appetites moving together. A flock can also be birds, sheep, or a congregation, and each fits the poem's mix of the animal and the religious. Judging by the title, the flock is the mob, and the mob rules.
The form matches this idea. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so no line is allowed to sound like a ruler. The stanzas run three, five, three and three lines, with the long middle one crowded by its list. Most lines have only two or three stresses, so the poem moves in short, flat steps, much like someone walking in a carcass. Even the sounds are earthy: the hard *k* of "carcass" returns in the last word, "flock", closing the poem on the same blunt note it opened with.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles an old idea, the self as a mind trapped in a body, and refuses to let it stay comfortable. The speaker begins as a lodger complaining about the building. He ends as part of the crowd that he thought he could leave behind. The poem doesn't console, but it is honest about how little the "I" controls.