Talkies

Little monster, little sun-belly explosion on top,

You are reading stories written for you in simple sentences of talking animals vs. overt cruel deformities, heartbeat or heart bleed brought ready to your unformed mental spaghetti with repeated short syllables, breakneck paced plots written out meandering slow, learning goat's tricks to keep trolls on edge until the deadly force propping up civil ties butts them finally off the bridge--

I can't take responsibility for all the weird narratives Mr. Film imprints on you, wary as I am, cautious as I am to move your eyes over pleasantries and hearty stories like vegetable soup, instead of putrid pop-40 pixelated pixies voiced by actors who will be old by the time you're young, but you love to repeat, repeat, repeat, you verse yourself in the verbals of our time, you rainbow record, etching your own grooves with your heart's stylus.

Just love the things I love so we'll have something to talk about when I'm forty-three and you're going to college, or shipping off, or trekking the Appalachians looking for Pennsylvania Sasquatch, starting an apprenticeship with the neighborhood self-driving car repairman, so when you come home we can reminisce about movies committed to the notched chemical-plastic strips before your grandfather was born.

Real things frighten me, so you might as well be scared by unreal unthings, and then teach me how to ride a bike, or fix a flat, or do algebra II, because I can't even tell you how to fix a sentence, let alone to conjure up monsters of your own.  Find some out there, bring them back here, and I'll tell you all about them.

I see you line up all your bitty dinosaurs made of dinosaur bits, and you're re-enacting the latest kid's movie craze, or you're standing on your bed reciting an entire episode of the Science Guy, or making up a Pokemon Quiz Show Game, and I see you staring off into the vast distance, I know you're thinking, you're thinking, and I'm thinking, are you just running movies behind your staring eyes, or are you wondering why Daddy goes to the theater some nights, or why we can't go mini-golfing every day, or wondering if you will be eaten by trolls--

Sometimes you let me in, but you are a virtually crafted meme machine, your dictionary bursts of pre-constructed sentences, mixed and matched and stitched together in your brain's meaning-quilt.  I watch your shows with you, Turing to your Enigma, and I will crack your code, little German T-machine, or I will stare at you until we are both just words-in-ourselves, and don't need simple Hollywood mechanicals to light each other's mouths.