by Clark Elder Morrow

When I was young
my toys intoxicated:
the bright plastic stagecoach and horses,
the smooth rubbery plastic:
soft like grilled cheese,
yieldingly melded with
the bright browns and yellows—the feel and the sight
had me at first feel, first sight. Drunk
with their sweet sensuality
I swooned as I played with them, my
giggles the gushing of a lush
high on Hasbro, Marx, and plastic interlocking parts
of a fort I would have died to live within.
My green plastic army men
Burned and flared eidetically,
so engrossing I remember their faces
(but not my friends’)
with their hard nubby helmets, backpacks, boots
and slight bendable rifle-wisps
in the hot dirt, with nothing but time,
under suns and skies
breeding blues and yellows and joys
upon blues and yellows and joys—
healthy as a bright young sungod
and just as exultant, I
loved my plastic jeeps on the little
highways I cut for them, loved them
as I have never since loved anything so small.

And when I tore open
a big Cape Canaveral rocket station
one Christmas morning
in an agony of ecstasy
I died for a time, a time in which
I saw God and thanked Him (I think with song, certainly with tears)
for my white smooth visored glorious spacehelmet.