David Spicer

YOU TELL ME

Some people need killing. You know who my object of opprobrium is: the plump-faced misogynist who moved in down the street. Besides being a misogynist, this mutt has eyes for ten-year olds, and he’s a xenophobe, a cripple-hater, a racist. This mutt could be as bad as… You tell me. This mongrel’s so vile crocodiles won’t eat him after an assassin tosses his bloated body into an Okeefenokee swamp. Am I advocating murder? You tell me. I bet you’ve thought about it. But nobody gets away with murder, you tell me. Or so we’d like to think. I could tell you how to get away with murder, but I’ve never wasted anybody, so I’m not an expert and you’d be a fool to take my advice. First of all, don’t confide in anybody. Never. Not even your spouse, not your fuck buddy after a wet night in bed, not when the twilight’s so beautiful in Flagstaff you can’t resist upchucking your secret to the person closest to you. Don’t have accomplices because at least one of them will be stupid and have a big mouth. And when you’ve finally decided to do it, for Christ’s sake wear gloves and a forensic-measured, paper kill-suit. Shave every bit of hair you have. I’m probably leaving something out. All perfect murderers do. Have you ever wanted to kill anybody? Come on, you can tell me. Has somebody raped your little girl in such a brutal way you don’t want the scumbag who did it to share the air with everybody else? Have you ever read a newspaper account of a home invader who walked away on a technicality? Oh, you tell me, I wouldn’t stoop to the level of somebody like that. Maybe not. But you know as well as I do we’re all capable of anything. Sin on the side of beauty, you advise me. You’re right, I know. Watch the sun gradually rise up from the ground in beautiful increments of bright color until you have to turn your eyes away or risk blindness. Don’t think about disgusting human beings, you tell me. You’re not perfect, you tell me. Otherwise you wouldn’t be writing this. But you’re human. Resist the urge. Hope somebody else has the balls to off this one-off, because admit it: you’re just all talk and no action, aren’t you? I imagine somebody’ll try soon, though. Then we can breathe freely again, then we can think about the future, then we can close our eyes and smell the mince pie baking in the kitchen instead of being afraid all of the time. We can be happy to be human again instead of ashamed, instead of thinking about murder, instead of thinking someone’s so despicable that he needs killing, can’t we? You tell me.


Gerald So reads "You Tell Me":



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David confesses: "I felt the present political and social climates were ripe for a piece homing in on a specific perpetrator against women and that the piece would be more effective if a misogynistic and pedophilic criminal resided in the speaker's neighborhood, making the immediacy of crime more heartfelt and intense."

DAVID SPICER has had poems in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, The New Verse News, The Laughing Dog, In Between Hangovers, Easy Street, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.