super

i remember you used to spend all your time uploading planets onto your computer, swelling stars for eyes. You were reading caramelized pages of exclamations and knuckle sandwiches across a stretching city. the stark and pulsating screen would wrap itself around you and give you a red migraine, crackling blue nail polish spilled at the side of your heating laptop. you scanned it once, issues and volumes of saving the world on a laminated schedule. you watched that snazzy tv show once and that was it, light drooling radioactive goo and drenching your bedsheets. you let noise ring in your head for a while until neon rays of super were bursting from your headache. you shed your token pair of big, round glasses, and popped out a wide elastic smile, crinkly like tinfoil. you grew taller, snapped into a different person. to save that bustling cosmopolitan city, you had the whole waxy suit, cape, leggings, and vivid triangle underwear. and you had suddenly stained yourself with this glow, and squeezed the sun like an orange, tight. tight enough for it to leak into the world.

hero

the citizens of the metropolis swarm around you like avid bees now. they marvel at you, overlapping and galloping mountains, stainless skyscrapers you can uproot and swallow. tree trunks you can crush. you never did mind it. pow! you're buzzing and zipping, cutting a clean line, slurping up the air like it's a blue raspberry slushie. you're soaring and damsels in distress, your big arms swooping up babies that sprout freckles once you kiss them on the cheeks. you were always made of steel. you were ten feet tall, or you felt that way, digging your feet into the edge of the world and pushing your fist out. wham! now the taste of acid seemed to paint everything titanium and gold. you'd swirl the earth into a radiating melting swimming pool. getting rough, not waiting for the sun to rise, and basking in what was true. you had every citizen swooning, every crook in the city pleading kryptonite. zing! you were fizzing in their brains, the man of tomorrow.

alien

like a starving black hole, you’d drunk it all up. and i think you remember that, how they would feed you with headlines, drumming on a superhuman heart. and how you felt stuck in shapeshift. you had been swearing you heard krypton in the near distance craving a sucker punch in half open eyes and slanted, zipped-up words. rushed and hidden words in fading invisible ink. the globe is quiet now, tumbling stars and no more comic outbursts of stomping sound and light and roygbiv color. i guess you could say you knew how Atlas felt, crushed under weight like the patterns of colors in the nebulae you pass. now they just wait for those after you. watch the humble earth roll away and disappear, biting your tongue till the universe shows up and saves You again.