Six short lines, and a whole performance collapses in the last two words. Dave Bonta's "Tycoon" opens like a small piece of theatre: "all morning I act the part / of an old head / full of business." The speaker is playing a role, the weighty, preoccupied man of affairs, and the title names it before the poem does. Then the second stanza swings the spotlight around onto the actor. He is "in no mind to play / what I am," and what he is arrives bluntly and unflatteringly as "fat rat."
The central idea is the gap between the part we put on and the creature underneath. The tycoon is a costume, and the poem seems less interested in the power than in the wearer's private sense of being something smaller, hungrier and more ridiculous. Whether the speaker is disgusted by this or oddly comfortable with it is left open, and that openness is part of the poem's charm.
The phrase "old head / full of business" rewards a slow look. "Head" can mean the head of a firm, and "old head" can suggest someone seasoned and wise. Taken literally, though, it is a head with no body, a container stuffed with business. The word "business" itself slides between commerce and plain busyness, so the importance is also a kind of fuss. A head that is full has no room for anything else, which prepares for the speaker's admission that he is "in no mind" to do anything more. The body only turns up in the final line, and it is a fat one.
That final line is the poem's sharpest stroke. English already has a phrase for a rich and comfortable boss, "fat cat," and the ear half expects it. Bonta gives us "fat rat" instead. The cat becomes its prey, vermin, a scavenger. The word "rat" also carries other associations, such as the informer or the betrayer, and the "rat race" of working life. I read "fat" as suggesting something that has fed well and grown sleek on what it has gathered, so the insult comes with a hint of self-satisfaction.
The syntax of "in no mind to play what I am" is deliberately slippery. It could mean that the speaker refuses to act out his true self, preferring the mask. It could also mean he is too tired to keep up any performance, even honest ones. The verbs deepen the joke. "Act" in the first stanza and "play" in the second are both theatrical words, so the speaker is cast in both halves, first as the tycoon and then as himself. Playing himself turns out to be the harder part, or the less flattering one. "Mind" also answers "head": the head is full, yet the mind is absent.
The form does a great deal with very little. There is no rhyme at the line ends, but "part" and "rat" share a clipped closing sound, and the poem saves a real rhyme for the very end, packed inside the last line: "fat rat." It is a tiny couplet arriving after the poem has seemed to refuse all neatness, which makes it land like a punchline. The lines also thin out, running roughly seven, four, four, five, three, and two syllables, so the poem narrows toward a point. Everything is lowercase and unpunctuated, and one sentence slips across the stanza break. That drop from respectable first stanza to the blunt last line mimics the deflation it describes. The hard consonants of "part," "head," "play," "fat" and "rat" give the ending a snap, like a trap closing.
"All morning" may be the most telling phrase. It suggests a workday of impersonation, the tiring labour of seeming important, and it implies that the afternoon belongs to something less polished. This is what makes the poem worth reading. In about two dozen words it manages satire, self-mockery and a small confession, and it asks any reader who has ever put on a professional face whether they know the animal underneath.