In the poem “Coming Out of Wal-Mart” by Mark Defoe, the freedom and joy of youth is very well portrayed. A boy and the man who is “a cut out of the boy,” and so is presumably his father, are leaving the store with a new bicycle for the child. The seemingly unremarkable and familiar scene evokes in the reader feelings of nostalgia and delight. The image of youth’s carefree nature is first illustrated with the lines “The boy steers the bike as if he steered a soap bubble, a blown glass swan, a cloud.”, in which all of the objects mentioned are very free and dream-like, just as the world is through a child’s eyes. Defoe also shows how the boy’s childlike happiness influences the father, first describing him as “grizzled, knotted like a strange