John Forche's Poem 'The Colonel'

People in the top 10% of the world are completely oblivious to what the rest of the world experiences. In countries like America, people take their possessions for granted and only observe what the rest of the world experiences through art such as poems. A poem entitled "The Colonel" may seem to be about another sadistic tyrant, but, instead, acknowledges the contradictions between normal, mundane aspects of upper class life and the harsh reality of what the rest of the world experiences.
Forche's poem starts out with a simple statement: "What you heard is true." This sentence immediately grabs the reader's attention and begs for his or her ear. This not only presents the reader with an immediate desire to determine what they supposedly already know, but subtly begins driving a convicting message that reveals itself upon further reading.

She describes his daughter sitting on the couch filing her nails, his son going out for the night, "daily papers" and "pet dogs" sitting on the cushion beside him. However, some details appear off-putting to what one would picture as a normal family life. There is a pistol laying beside the colonel and broken bottles embedded into the wall, their purpose being to "scoop kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace." Not only is there, what seems to be, weapons used to brutally murder people in their home, but the colonel and his family act like they are normal, ignoring the glaring abnormality of their professedly normal life. This dichotomy begins to point to the convicting message of the poem: that the reader already knows the harsh reality of the world, but continues to ignore the weight of the