"Funny Books" by Robert Morgan

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.