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I melted military men.

Small strings of smoke wither upwards thickly wanting weight.
 
I imagine something like that going
through the mind that wrote Wonka pulling
 
          caramel,
          taffy,
          fudge.
 
All this pushes down,
melts away—
          have to use a putty knife
to scrape it from the floor.
Whole images shatter into words     broken sentences.
Or, get fat

          too globular
          inhuman un-
 
canny     more left after than came before.
 
At home that summer I saw her eat
a whole bag of chewy candy

     —inhaled vowels—

while sitting on the couch mulling some things into no things.
I melted plastic men from Iwa Jima into formless puddles—
 
all fricatives mess
Grey s q l m n r v s,
downward,
into, as much as possible,
on top of,
chewing cement and releasing a singular and substantive string
upward.     I breathed it in like memory making.
 
So: her fingers unwrapping my matches igniting,
candy like wax infantry men melting away
into these lines
no matter how hard I blow
they just sink, settle and stiff.