like when all we made were those salty snakes

I woke up this morning and,
finding my body sore and moaning,
checked for bits of broken plaster, chipped metal:
a casting mistake or
impurity of character,

I checked underneath my feet for
markings, a stamp,
the five or ten or two hundred and fifty of
five thousand
I had seen under the feet of
so many others my age--
and found,
to my surprise,
only smooth pink soles.

Knowing myself to be far more cunning
than bronze,
I laughed and reached out
to my aching back and
expected to find splinters to smooth,
to sand my clever wooden body back to
wellness and perfection
as I was carved and
jumped
when my dexterous digits
probed pliant plasticine,
brought back hands covered in
sticky bright bits of blue and pink
of modeling clay
and found those fingers made of the same
bright
sculptor's wax.

My fingertips like sculptor's tools
plunged into my
stop-motion heart and massaged it
into a shape
resembling you
with your polymer eyes and
play-doh smile,
brilliant like the childish hues, lips soft
like the clay
we are made of.

I smooth vibrant modeling clay
across my gaping chest
to contain you in my yielding ribcage and
explore
with hopeful hands
my skull
and find no grey matter
but a rainbow of malleable folds,
glittering synapses
in a brain
beautiful as a box of broken crayons
in the hands of a genius unchanged
by demands of plaster cast
certainties.

We are not statues cast in bronze:
molten metal flowing
velvet-smooth
into predictable molds
for facsimile sculpture.
We are juvenile neons
in malleable clumps
that, with age,
do not harden
and grow brittle
and break when dropped
onto concrete reality.