Ten Days Before The Insurrection by David Spicer

After you’ve guillotined me and placed
my body in the sarcophagus I’ve
requested, after you’ve repressed me
and overruled my wish for lindens
to sway at the moment of my death,
a peace will saturate the burning cities,
and the children, ravens on shoulders,
will don babushkas and bayonets,
mourning me for twelve sunrises.
They’ll worship and clutch my image
on lithographed banners. You can’t
masquerade in disguises of my
caricature, for the children will menace you
because the savior of their republic sings
no more. Quarrel among yourselves,
prove you’re not the disease. Flex
muscles, gobble delicacies, allow
your eyes to twinkle. Either offer
them suffrage–declare that your mission–
or squeeze yourselves into the hothouses
of greed, dress in helmets and sashes,
and indulge in glorious last flings, because
the moment electricity ends, they’ll
overrun your battlefield, and you may
commit one or two atrocities, but it is then
that we’ll achieve victory you never knew.

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, Chiron Review, Easy Street, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, among others, 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 Best of the Net twice and a Pushcart, 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.