An Open Letter…
An Open Letter to Up and Coming World-Savers
(Wonder Woman)
We all know the keys to our own transformations:
the secluded phone booths, the darkened caves,
the candlesticks that open the secret changing room
in the library, the magic words that conjure lightning,
and on and on. We’ve all created our methods
of shedding self in favor of Freud’s superego.
And while the formulaic dangers persist—the villains
shambling over the landscape in their giant robots,
launching into their fits of egomania, their grand soliloquies
protesting their underappreciated intelligence or perhaps
just their general discontent at whatever plot twist
was written into their lives and broke their will
to resist the Id—while all of these persist,
both the superhero and the superego are blessed.
This is the time of logic, of well-defined conclusions,
of rising action, climactic battle, predictable outcome.
This is the time when the hero can honestly say “I exist.”
But then the dust settles. The arch nemesis is taken away—
until their next scheduled escape—the fires are outed,
the busted buildings cordoned off and scheduled
for later resurrection, the survivors reunited with the arms
of whomever they called out for as the world was crashing
down. And the dead, even they are given their proper
placement in the gardens of our memory.
But then, what of the hero? Dressed in the glamour
of their gilded getup with no one left to save, with nothing left
to do but return to their practiced fictions: a newspaper reporter,
an aloof billionaire, a teacher, a policeman,
a soldier, a poet, whatever it is they were before
the cape and the double-edged promises that are woven
into the fabric of such things. The hero, they stretch
and bend and tear at the seams of their existence
trying to fill the shadow left by that noble, mythological
alternative self; trying to remain, for a little while longer
more of the “Super” than of the “man,” more of the “Wonder”
than the “woman.” But night invariably comes.
The costume always sullies and the outer skin
must inevitably be removed. To those aspiring
to be rescuers, those hoping to be the hands of salvation
for someone at any cost, I offer this advice:
console the mirror first. Because, more than any death
rays, more than any mad scientist or extra-dimensional
overlord yearning for conquest and power, more than
a storyline cancellation, more than a wounded heart,
it is the dissonance of double lives that kills us.
from the collection “…hide behind me…”
click to hear me read this poem
2 Responses to “An Open Letter…”
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I stumbled on your site while putting together a unit on Graphic Novels for my Senior Honors English class. I wanted to include poetry because I think its an important element when discussing visual text, and your poems blew me away. If this the beginning, I can’t wait to see the complete project.
Thanks! Glad to hear you’re enjoying the site. The Graphic Poetry project is a slow-moving animal, but things are still moving forward. Which is always good!