(Written in the wake of my son watching yet another one of those superhero films. Wondering what they tell us about our culture and our aspirations. And being a curmudgeon.)

Superhero

Tonight I am special

The atomic spider bit deep and now

I top the bill of this everyday freak show

looking down from height, my laser vision

scanning for photogenic girls to

save from the clutch of some comic-cut villains

because every empire needs a

convenient kind of evil

to scare the children to their bed and

the parents to their polling booths

Tomorrow I will be ordinary

I will commute through the same crowds as the crowd

all of us on our way to work in shops to earn money

to spend in other shops and if we are lucky

a little will be left for some compensatory

distraction. A movie perhaps?

We can watch the gods up there in their plastic palaces.

Fearing this truth:

that if we are all extraordinary

then none could ever be a super

and who would want a world like that?