SHOCK’s resident poet Nigel Parkin gives us some SHOCKing sonnets and horrifying haikus.
David Cronenberg’s THE DEAD ZONE
The classroom bell rings.
The children still are sitting,
Held by ‘The Raven’.
He closes his book,
Our hero, haunted by Poe,
Possessing the words.
He speaks the last verse,
Called up from shadows within,
Then lets himself smile.
Is the spell broken?
‘Pretty good, huh?’ he asks them.
Does this reduce it?
Little does he know,
This modest man, what it means,
The promise it holds.
A tale of love lost,
Of solitude and anguish,
Prophecies of doom.
This is his future.
He’s a man out of his time.
The bell told us that.
When words should have stopped,
When youthful hearts should have flown,
He held them in place.
He’ll do this again,
Grip people, fix them with stares,
Haunted by their truth.
He’ll take possession
Of the darkness in their souls,
Their secrets, their fates.
Just like Poe’s dark bird
He’ll rap on the chamber doors
Of conscience and fear.
In the gazebo,
Touching the dead, he sees all –
The killer. His face.
Holding the boy’s arm
He sees the children sinking,
Swallowed by the ice.
And at the rally,
Meeting the next President,
He sees the world end.
He knows he must act.
Painful blank spots in his mind
Tell him this can change.
Terrible knowledge –
This dead zone is killing him.
But what a power…
The angel of death,
Raven with black-winged collar,
Is a messiah.
It’s a masterpiece,
This tale of a fading man
Destroyed by his mind.
It’s pure Cronenberg
Watching with cool detachment
As hearts bleed and burn.
Walken says it best –
Smash! ‘The ice is gonna break!’
Intensity wins.
