David Spicer

FALSE CONFESSION

Let me amuse myself and devour
your attention, since I’m under arrest
and you’ve found Clarissa,
my lichen-laced .357 Magnum
lost on Pacific Road. Care if I smoke?
I won’t slobber. You want me to sing,
I’ll sing like a chimp, though I’m not
your straw man. Reject what I say,
I don’t care. My first victim—don’t
know her name—died in a coma in Vietnam.
I tossed the next one, Eddie Merton,
into a gully after wrapping him in a hopsack
shroud, lips glued, brains splattered.
Then the hipster rat Hindu—not a Hindu,
but an acidhead. I stole his shadow,
watching him disappear into thick air.
Voyeur that I am, I loved that! Drifting
to Nebraska, land of sallow ice
and baseball snowflakes, I met
a Detroit anarchist in a meat market.
Hog-tied her with rusty chains.
Sure, I’ll have coffee. Black. My next girl,
an Omaha librarian, fought me. It took two
minutes in a wheat field to pull Clarissa's
trigger. I sniffed every inch of Omaha’s body.
Don’t believe any of this? Join the club, pigs.


Gerald So reads "False Confession"



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David confesses: "I read about Henry Lee Lucas in Vanity Fair years ago, and recently Vanity Fair Confidential aired an episode on him; I found myself writing this persona poem about a wily, evil, deceptive character who loved to yank the chains of cops whom he deemed less intelligent than he was."

DAVID SPICER has had poems in Chiron Review, Reed Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Prime Number, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, Rat's Ass Review, Slim Volume, The New Verse News, Easy Street, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., among others, and in A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart, two Best of the Nets, is the author of one full-length collection of poems and four chapbooks, and is the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.