Tommy (King poem)
"Tommy" is a narrative poem by Stephen King, first published in the March, 2010 edition of Playboy, and later collected and re-introduced in the November 3, 2015 anthology The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. In the new introduction King disputes the famous adage : "If you remember the Sixties, you weren't there."
The poem is free verse and steeped in the slang and cultural references of the 1960s, a decade which encompassed all of King's teenage years. It describes the unique burial of the titular young man, a hippie who died of leukaemia, and the subsequent lives of his closest friends. The poem's themes, of the inevitable effects of age and mortality, make it something of a memento mori. The aforementioned introduction's suggestion, that Tommy is based on a real person, place it in the confessional genre of poetry.
