Poetry

The Green Man

Yeah I’m the Green Man, what of it?
Green for a reason too.
But if I’m honest, sometimes green in more ways than one.
Stupid, good for nothing Red Man, stealing all the glory.
It’s called limelight because it’s meant to be lime, right?
It wouldn’t bother me so much if it was called scarlet light,
or crimson light,
or magenta light,
but let’s be honest,
that just sounds like a cheap soft drink
and he’s just complicating lexical connotations.
I have to live with him you know.
The insolent twit.
It’s a tight squeeze as well, that little black box,
tighter still with his walloping ego crowding up the place
like Crowdy McCrowderson eating Crowd Pie at a Crowd Convention.
“Red red red, I’m the red man, get to see everything,
reddy red red, look at me, I’m so re-” yeah WE GET IT.

You lot don’t help the situation either.
Clearly stated on the little black box are the words,

“PEDESTRIANS

Push button and wait

for signal opposite.”

Just because there’s quite a large gap between each line of text,
It doesn’t grant you authority to read between them.
The. Green. Cross. Code.
See the word order?
‘Green’ then ‘cross.’
It’s a syntactic instruction!
Urgh.
It just really gets to me sometimes.
You don’t realise how demoralising it is
when your occupation,
your calling in life,
your means for existence,
is to watch for the illumination of the ‘wait’ sign
and deliver the appropriate service,
but every time you attempt to do so
you’re met with an empty crossing
and an awkward train of ticked off traffic
due to the fact that the intended beneficiary
has diced with death,
thrown caution to the wind,
and crossed under the warped guidance
of the intolerable Red Man.
Call yourselves Pedestrians?
You’ll be Deadestrians soon,
I’ll tell you that for nothing.
There’ll come a time when you’ll be let late out of work,
you won’t get to Boots in time to have
your prawn mayo, chicken salad and BLT triple sandwich meal deal
and you won’t have much energy as a result.
Your arms will feel weaker than usual,
caution will be too heavy for you to throw,
and the wind won’t even try to catch it,
it’ll just sit and laugh at you.
Then you’ll wish you waited for me, won’t you?
I’d be very careful if I was you,
because how do you think that zebra got there?

Hannah O’Brien