Sunday, March 5, 2017

"Funny Books" by Robert Morgan

Dell pinup
The item above, a pinup depicting eighteen Dell comic-book characters, was first offered
as a subscription premium in the Dell comics of the 1950 Christmas season,
 the issues dated December 1950 and January 1951. -- Michael Barrier


Because my parents had denied
me comic books as sordid and
salacious, I would sneak a look
at those of friends, the bold and bright
slick covers, pages rough as news
and inked in pinks and greens and blues
as cowboys shouted in balloons
and Indian yells were printed on
the clouds. I borrowed books and hid
them in the crib and under shoes
and under bed. The glories of
those hyperbolic zaps and screams
were my illuminated texts,
the chapbook prophets of forbidden
and secret art, the narratives
of quest and conquest in the West,
of Superman and Lash Larue.
The print and pictures cruder than
the catalog were sweeter than
the cake at Bible School. I crouched
in almost dark and swilled the words
that soared in their balloons and bulbs
of grainy breath into my pulse,
into the stratosphere of my
imagination, reaching Mach
and orbit speed, escape velocity
just at the edge of Sputnik’s age,
in stained glass windows of the page.

"Funny Books" by Robert Morgan from The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems.
 © Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

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