David Spicer- Three Poems

ULTIMATUM

 

Ondine puffed Moroccan cigarillos

on the terrace every night

after home-cooking and candlelight.

We possessed stockbroker appetites,

loved the action of casinos and the wooing

of barkers and shills. I forgot the literature

of the bluenose travel agency, and we craved

each other like gang members.

We dated in a déjà vu of Havana 1959.

Yes, the town was our turf, we were blithe

villains to the baroque gossipers of the square

until I transformed into a bootlicking funnyman.

I realize it was a stupid brainstorm, a scraggly

fantasy wearing black tights. I didn’t panic:

I swallowed my pride, married her,

gathered my stolen property,

and waved as I fell into the last

seat of a bus with no destination.

AN APPLE FOR TULIPS

 

Sunday, three Arab princes

presented me with a sculpted

apple from the Arctic. Redder

than a blushing hero I wanted

to draw with a crayon, its tongue

wagged in my cabin. Surely

this must be a folktale, I declared.

We laughed and I offered them

tea and lobster from a forest in Paradise,

but they declined. Enchanted, I gave

them three freckled green tulips I had stolen

from a streetcar. They chuckled when

I wiped my elbows with a handkerchief.

The blind one toasted me with brandy,

called me a pillar of the community.

I cried with joy, shaking their gloved hands.

KILLER AMONG US

 

The waitress Doria worked midnight

shift, and I lounged in the booth,

ordered an omelette with a drumstick,

scratching my beard, the junkyard

of my hidden face. Oh, and a juice.

Apple. Later in the dark mornings

the diner bustled with millworkers,

zookeepers, mariachi shakers,

a stinky, skinny serial killer who called

himself Capricorn. We laughed

listening to his confessions of over three

hundred kills—his stories sprawled

with each telling. Doria and I resented

him: he glowed as a new victim entered

his world, thinking we all feared him

and his various methods: placing

a child asleep next to a gorilla

in the African Den, strangling a priest

with a rosary, pouring concrete over

a chained biker. Capricorn, eyes bulged

with glee, told us he kept the pedal clutcher’s

tattered leather, wore it for us one morning.

As he jabbered, he swiped the crumbs

of my eggs and chicken, reassuring us,

Don’t worry, lovely sparrows, I won’t kill

any of you, I have a mother to contend with.

Before he left every sunrise, he’d stagger

to the toilet and return to present his

unanswered riddle of previous mornings:

Would you believe me if I were you?

David Spicer has had poems in Yellow Mama, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, The Laughing Dog, In Between Hangovers, The American Poetry Review, Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart, 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.