Little Green Mannerisms
Little Green Mannerisms
by Matt Ronquillo
The child had pristinely flat jaws of swirling granite.
Its teeth were intricately carved pieces of wood attached by hinges.
I carried it out to where mom had the old green Plymouth Voyager overhauled
with an LS1 engine and all the back bench seats gutted.
A foreign viciousness glimmered in her eyes.
I closed the door cautiously,
and the child and I burst forward into colors.
I stopped to have a drink in
“Slovakia,” the bar tender said, without a trace of concern at the question.
I stretched out on a little platform next to infinite stone pits dipping into the floor,
which I knew had just slung down real low because my sentience popped up
in something’s cross-hairs.
I walked outside, spared for now, into a public execution
in the beautiful sunlight in an old town square.
An advanced technological swing set held three moaning expatriates,
their three friends dancing and singing for amusement to the side of it.
Everybody knew what would happen when curiosity waned into
the desperation of the performers bled through their act.
The crowd turned away in horror.
The swing was released into blades and fire. The three expatriates shrieked,
and the scorched scalp of one was flung at our feet when the swing came back
where the performers collapsed.
The clumsy clacking of loose wood on rock flipped low-toned
fact down the cobble stone road. Something about the fire judging all.
It drifted into the square so cliche it blew our quieted minds.
Because something had ultimate control here,
and was sinister enough to use melodrama before smoking its prisoners.
I returned to the car and the child was gone,
having left a note etched in controlled fury into the windshield:
how it assumed this was home. How it sensed malleability in the sky
through which it aspired to vent itself.
i’m gonna take a stab at this and say:
You used to get Seth from the OC at age 19 when that show was out and you worked at a parking lot in orange county. You signed a pizza box as adam brody with a sharpie once after these 16 year old girls asked if you were him and you told them yeah. Because Know how many girls paid attention to you when you were 16? Capital Zero, Jack! And you’ve been riding that immature revenge train ever since!
At first when i was reading this poem i thought the ‘child’ was like a pinochio puppet or some shit. The more i read on though, i figured it was an abstract on your experiences. Some awesome awesome lines to bite into here including: “I knew had just slung down real low because my sentience popped up
in something’s cross-hairs.”
Sometimes i think readers, even fellow poets, want to ‘whip a confession’ out of a poem like Billy Collins says. But i’m a fan of the abstract otherwise poets would just be short story artists who take 14 lines from their story and call it a poem. Maybe that’s not fair. lol. Anyways. Keep on rockin’ in the free world bro! Use your trident sparingly and be gentle with the mermaids!