Summary
The speaker announces that he will kill someone today, though he is open to killing "anything" at all. He plans to do so because he is tired of feeling ignored and wants to play God. The weather outside is glum and ordinary. The speaker kills a fly by squashing it with his hand against the window, and remembers that he used to do this to pass the time in school. He also used to learn Shakespeare at school, but didn't understand it: Shakespeare felt like "another language." Now the dead fly is also in "another language," changed from its previous state. The speaker breathes on the windowpane, referring to his exhalation as "talent," and writes his name on the foggy window. He announces that he is a genius, who could do anything he wanted if he'd only had the chance. Today he will change the world, or "something's" world, presumably by killing that "something." His cat avoids him and hides, knowing that the speaker is a genius.
Analysis
This poem's depiction of a murderer is haunting, but not because its content is graphic or gory. Instead, its frightening power comes from the frankness of its tone. The speaker, as depicted here, is both deranged and completely lucid. While he certainly has delusions about his own intelligence and importance—referring to himself as a genius and to his very breath as "talent"—he is also entirely aware of what he is about to do and appears to be in total control. The internal logic undergirding his reasoning even makes a certain degree of sense. He wants to "play God" and to gain attention so that he stops feeling ignored, and his plan to kill somebody will likely allow him to do this. Duffy uses highly straightforward and accessible syntax and diction. To an extent, this choice highlights the speaker's normal levels of education and intelligence. It also makes his meanings stark and clear, so that the poem is all the more disturbing and its meaning all the more unavoidable.
Duffy encourages readers to wonder whether the speaker's violent tendencies come from an innate, fundamental problem or are rooted in the failures of his society. His memories of his schooldays suggest that the latter is at least partly to blame. He remembers Shakespeare's plays feeling like "another language." This hints that he found his education to be exclusionary, confusing, and alienating—making him feel hopelessly at odds with society instead of helping him find meaning or stability within it. Moreover, the speaker's memory of killing insects at school makes clear that even early signs of his mental disturbance and disinterest at school were left unaddressed. Thus, even when authority figures had the power to prevent the speaker's devolution into a killer, they did not do so.
Because he feels that he has no power in society, particularly in comparison to the outsize amount of power he believes himself to be owed, the speaker wants to assert and gain power through killing another person. The way in which he imagines this power is striking. He argues that, by doing so, he will "change the world./Something’s world." The first part of this assertion lets us know that he wants fame, but the second part reveals a certain twisted empathy: he wants to connect with or impact another person, but the only way in which he is able to conceive of doing so is through harming them.
