POEM - The Confession (A Stephen King cento)
This is a poem that took a lot of research to compose, and a lot of care to thread.
It is a cento (a poem comprised entirely of lines from others' work, a pastiche) in which all of the borrowed lines are the first lines of a Stephen King short story, novella or novel. I collected a great many first lines (not every possible one, but close) and then chunked it out based on content. Then I threaded it until a story seemed to emerge. Eerily enough, it reads like something King might have written under the same rules.
The only liberty I took with the lines was to change proper names to he or she, though what names do appear are mostly true to their original stories. I just let a character keep their initial introduction, then changed any other relative line's character to refer to the initially introduced character.
The amount of love I have for the author's work should be readily apparent in the amount of time and effort it took to produce this piece (I find "compose" is a strong word to use when talking about a cento). I love King, and every line I compiled was pulled out of the many volumes that bear his name sitting right beside my desk at all times.
This is one I'll be sharing at the 24-hour reading this weekend.
THE CONFESSION
(A Stephen King cento of “hookers”)
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young - only nine years old.
It’s a great relief to write this down.
This is what happened.
. . .
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
. . .
He looked like the total all-American kid as he pedaled his twenty-six inch Schwinnn with the apehanger handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that’s just what he was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy one hundred and forty pounds, hair the color of ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne.
September 15th was his birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a Sun.
When Hal Shelburn saw it, when his son Dennis pulled it out of a mouldering Ralston-Purina carton that had been pushed far back under one attic eave, such a feeling of horror and dismay rose in him that for one moment he thought he would scream.
"Denny, what’s that over there? Oh shit."
At first glance it looked like a Wang word processor - it had a Wang keyboard and a Wang casing.
We moved it last year, and quite an operation it was, too, he said as they mounted the stairs.
Todd’s mother went to the door, hesitated there, came back, and tousled his hair.
The old man sat in the barn doorway in the smell of apples, rocking, wanting not to want to smoke not because of the doctor but because now his heart fluttered all the time.
The barbecue was over.
. . .
The guy’s name was Snodgrass and I could see him getting ready to do something crazy.
In previous years, he had always taken pride in his lawn.
"I came to you because I want to tell my story, the man on my couch was saying."
The question is: Can he do it?
The most important things are the hardest things to say.
. . .
“ --
I’ve never told anyone this story, and never thought I would - not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed…and because it was mine.
People’s lives - their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences - begin at different times.
I’ve got a good job now, and no reason to feel glum.
But Viet Nam was over and the country was getting on.
My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she’s probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him.
Miss Sidley was her name, and teaching was her game.
I waited and watched for seven years.
She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window.
Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane of glass into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this.
“I know what you need.”
The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning.
“Oh you cheap son of a bitch!” she cried in the empty hotel room, more in surprise than in anger.
By the time the woman had gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning.
They had been predicting a norther all week and along about Thursday we got it, a real screamer that pied up eight inches by four in the afternoon and showed no signs of slowing down.
I only saw the sign because I had to pull over and puke.
My old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.
My wife had been waiting for me since two, and when she saw the car pull up in front of our apartment building, she came out to meet me.
I turned the radio on too loud and didn’t turn it down because we were on the verge of another argument and I didn’t want it to happen.
But sometimes the sounds - like the pain - faded, and then there was only the haze.
I tried to scream but shock robbed my voice and I was able to produce only a low, choked whuffing - the sound of a man moaning in his sleep.
When Mary woke up, we were lost.
Considering it was probably the end of the world, I thought she was doing a good job.
The one thing nobody asked in casual conversation, she thought in the days after she found what she found in the garage, was this: How’s your marriage?
Officer Hunton got to the laundry just as the ambulance was leaving - slowly, with no siren or flashing lights.
L.T.’s boy came around the barracks a lot the year after his father died, I mean a lot, but nobody ever told him to get out the way or asked him what in hail he was doing there again.
-- ”
. . .
“Go on,” Snodgrass said again. “Look in the bag.”
It’s so dark that for awhile - just how long I don’t know - I think I’m still unconscious.
It was a deathroom.
. . .
The dawn washed slowly down Culver Street.
It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburg to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to this part of the world in October and although they didn’t get going until six o’clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there.
Walking to school you ask me
what other schools have grades.
It became our motto, and we couldn’t for the life of us remember which of us started saying it first.
I can’t go out no more.
You’ve been here before.
New England autumn and the thin soil now shows patches through the ragweed and goldenrod, waiting for snow still four weeks distant.
It is a cento (a poem comprised entirely of lines from others' work, a pastiche) in which all of the borrowed lines are the first lines of a Stephen King short story, novella or novel. I collected a great many first lines (not every possible one, but close) and then chunked it out based on content. Then I threaded it until a story seemed to emerge. Eerily enough, it reads like something King might have written under the same rules.
The only liberty I took with the lines was to change proper names to he or she, though what names do appear are mostly true to their original stories. I just let a character keep their initial introduction, then changed any other relative line's character to refer to the initially introduced character.
The amount of love I have for the author's work should be readily apparent in the amount of time and effort it took to produce this piece (I find "compose" is a strong word to use when talking about a cento). I love King, and every line I compiled was pulled out of the many volumes that bear his name sitting right beside my desk at all times.
This is one I'll be sharing at the 24-hour reading this weekend.
THE CONFESSION
(A Stephen King cento of “hookers”)
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young - only nine years old.
It’s a great relief to write this down.
This is what happened.
. . .
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
. . .
He looked like the total all-American kid as he pedaled his twenty-six inch Schwinnn with the apehanger handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that’s just what he was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy one hundred and forty pounds, hair the color of ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne.
September 15th was his birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a Sun.
When Hal Shelburn saw it, when his son Dennis pulled it out of a mouldering Ralston-Purina carton that had been pushed far back under one attic eave, such a feeling of horror and dismay rose in him that for one moment he thought he would scream.
"Denny, what’s that over there? Oh shit."
At first glance it looked like a Wang word processor - it had a Wang keyboard and a Wang casing.
We moved it last year, and quite an operation it was, too, he said as they mounted the stairs.
Todd’s mother went to the door, hesitated there, came back, and tousled his hair.
The old man sat in the barn doorway in the smell of apples, rocking, wanting not to want to smoke not because of the doctor but because now his heart fluttered all the time.
The barbecue was over.
. . .
The guy’s name was Snodgrass and I could see him getting ready to do something crazy.
In previous years, he had always taken pride in his lawn.
"I came to you because I want to tell my story, the man on my couch was saying."
The question is: Can he do it?
The most important things are the hardest things to say.
. . .
“ --
I’ve never told anyone this story, and never thought I would - not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed…and because it was mine.
People’s lives - their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences - begin at different times.
I’ve got a good job now, and no reason to feel glum.
But Viet Nam was over and the country was getting on.
My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she’s probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him.
Miss Sidley was her name, and teaching was her game.
I waited and watched for seven years.
She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window.
Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane of glass into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this.
“I know what you need.”
The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning.
“Oh you cheap son of a bitch!” she cried in the empty hotel room, more in surprise than in anger.
By the time the woman had gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning.
They had been predicting a norther all week and along about Thursday we got it, a real screamer that pied up eight inches by four in the afternoon and showed no signs of slowing down.
I only saw the sign because I had to pull over and puke.
My old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.
My wife had been waiting for me since two, and when she saw the car pull up in front of our apartment building, she came out to meet me.
I turned the radio on too loud and didn’t turn it down because we were on the verge of another argument and I didn’t want it to happen.
But sometimes the sounds - like the pain - faded, and then there was only the haze.
I tried to scream but shock robbed my voice and I was able to produce only a low, choked whuffing - the sound of a man moaning in his sleep.
When Mary woke up, we were lost.
Considering it was probably the end of the world, I thought she was doing a good job.
The one thing nobody asked in casual conversation, she thought in the days after she found what she found in the garage, was this: How’s your marriage?
Officer Hunton got to the laundry just as the ambulance was leaving - slowly, with no siren or flashing lights.
L.T.’s boy came around the barracks a lot the year after his father died, I mean a lot, but nobody ever told him to get out the way or asked him what in hail he was doing there again.
-- ”
. . .
“Go on,” Snodgrass said again. “Look in the bag.”
It’s so dark that for awhile - just how long I don’t know - I think I’m still unconscious.
It was a deathroom.
. . .
The dawn washed slowly down Culver Street.
It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburg to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to this part of the world in October and although they didn’t get going until six o’clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there.
Walking to school you ask me
what other schools have grades.
It became our motto, and we couldn’t for the life of us remember which of us started saying it first.
I can’t go out no more.
You’ve been here before.
New England autumn and the thin soil now shows patches through the ragweed and goldenrod, waiting for snow still four weeks distant.