THE DARK MAN

The Dark Man

Stephen King

Published in "Ubris", 1969 and later in Moth, 1970.

I have stridden the fuming way of sun-hammered tracks and

smashed cinders;

I have ridden rails

and bumed sterno in the

gantry silence of hob jungles: I am a dark man.

I have ridden rails

and passed the smuggery

of desperate houses with counterfeit chimneys and heard from the outside

the inside clink of cocktail ice while closed doors broke the world -

and over it all a savage sickle moon that bummed my eyes with bones of light.

I have slept in glaring swamps where musk-reek rose

THE DARK MAN

to mix with the sex smell of rotting cypress stumps where witch fire clung in sunken psycho spheres of baptism -

and heard the suck of shadows where a gutted columned house leeched with vines

speaks to an overhung mushroom sky I have fed dimes to cold machines in all night filling stations while traffic in a mad and flowing flame streaked red in six lanes of darkness, and breathed the cleaver hitchhike wind within the breakdown lane with thumb levelled and saw shadowed faces made complacent with heaters behind safety glass faces that rose like complacent moons in riven monster orbits.

and in a sudden jugular flash cold as the center af a sun

I forced a girl in a field of wheat THE DARK MAN

and left her sprawled with the virgin bread a savage sacrifice

and a sign to those who creep in fixed ways:

I am a dark man.

Document Outline

- Local Disk

- THE DARK MAN

Table of Contents

THE DARK MAN