It was a monster
of vile viridian,
its shirt alabaster,
its hat obsidian.

Its ghoul eyes,
with their pinprick pupils,
stared at sharded youth
with bane-black scruples.

Locked in that coma leer,
a rabbit waiting to be downed,
the boy did not see it,
did not so much as look around.

There was nothing but a glimpse,
nothing more than a glance
of a guillotine grin,
its sanity askance.

Those bone-white eyes,
rimmed with corpse red,
widened into burning moons
as the truck struck him half-dead.

The boy skittered across tarmac
in a confused spider-leg tumble,
while the creature’s truck
continued its animal rumble.

It screeched to a halt
drawing a scythe of rubber on the street;
its red form was enormous,
its every inch oozing heat.

The door thunked open,
the top hat flopped into the air.
The creature’s face was an emerald shadow,
its smile a dead moon laid bare.

Steel-toed boots scrape over blacktop
and enormous green hands clenched into fists
as the driver’s scarecrow figure
lurched through the dusty mists.

It loomed over the boy,
its form an inky silhouette
cast by the ruthless glare of the sun,
with its dearth of regret.

The boy,
his eyes blue supernovas,
his hair a riled haystack,
was
bleeding
broken
splintered
and
swollen
but he was
alive.

The green man’s grin became a sickle of glee.

He needed the boy,
that much was undeniable.

But he never said he needed him whole.