SHOCKing Sonnets: Spielberg and Matheson’s DUEL

SHOCK’s resident poet Nigel Parkin presents original works that go deep inside the soul of horror classics.

 

DUEL: Death of a Salesman?

I

How can he go so fast? This is not real.

That must be it. I’m lost in a nightmare

Where I have no real power or control,

Where children laugh at me and all adults

Wear masks of hostility, suspicion

And threat. This driver is any or all

Of them: Steve Henderson, his body pressed

Against my wife in full view of my boss,

The grin on his face saying, ‘You’re nothing,’

Shrinking me out of existence; my wife

Herself, dismissing me with that oh so

Disappointed tone; all those men lined up

At the  diner, brute clones, mocking me. Now

They’re all in that truck, bearing down on me.

II

The radiator hose! God! The warning!

The man at the pump was right this morning.

The wheels of fate will never stop turning.

All that smoke in my wake. Distress signal.

It’s been there all the time, invisible,

Coughing out of me, a feeble alarm –

MAN IN DISTRESS! Ha! How do you like that?

They’ve all popped my hood, looked into my soul,

Shaken their heads and said, ‘You won’t get far.’

I’ve been hearing that same line all my life.

This is where they always promised I’d be –

An empty, hot, vast expanse of nowhere,

A barren world of tumbleweed and dust,

Graveyard for the failed, the unloved. For me.

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