Description
The Dark Man follows a mysterious drifter wandering across America’s railways, observing poverty, violence, loneliness, and human weakness. Speaking in a haunting first-person voice, the narrator reveals an increasingly sinister nature, transforming from observer to menace. Dark, poetic, and unsettling, the poem introduces themes and imagery that would later influence Stephen King’s enduring villain, Randall Flagg.
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
Haunting, poetic, and sinister—an early glimpse of Flagg’s evil.