Interview With a Texas Oligarch

Vincent Hostak

April 6, 2025

Because I could not understand why

he is-the-way-he-is,

I asked him to tell me the story as if I were a child:

in a breathless fairytale.

As a child did you wander through the streets of Big Spring

on forever starless nights and

in perpetual absence of the moon?

Could you not see the movements of your own hands?

Did they make wealth by careful destruction and

was it better that you could not see their workings--

like the labor of drills in the earth’s black belly

splitting fine-grained shale, 

releasing inky fountains?

When your rich reserves grew as great 

as the swollen Basin’s

and you built your private school and your president,

were you blind to your stride 

over every dividing line?

Did you creep like sand under a horse-breaker’s fence?

Could you see oil seeping into Midland’s water and

were you reminded of weekends at the beach,

the strange swirls on an abalone shell?

You ask too many questions, he said.  

It’s far simpler in one-breath.

I want to be the most influential unit of power in the machine.

I want to be the bit of God’s drill.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.