Poem: Here Comes Spider-Man
Your Friendly Neighborhood Superhero and the Collateral Damage of Living
HERE COMES A SPIDER-MAN Uncle Ben was right. Or was it the French revolutionaries carting Louie to the guillotine, and does it matter? Between the motion And the act / Falls the Shadow It's like Wendell Berry's pond, dug from the downslope of a hill on his farm, success he thinks, until the rains come, wash a large slice of the woods floor into the earthen wound. It was too much power he writes and too little knowledge. Like Peter Parker battling Crusher Hogan for some cash or worse -- Norman Osborne experimenting on himself, exploding into super-villainy, more himself than he'd been before. We can engineer ourselves out of or in to anything. That's the power of our species, to redirect the rivers, remake the world -- until the storm comes, sends a sea surge across asphalt, nowhere for the water to go but down city streets and into subway tunnels. Water seeks equilibrium, fills pores and pours through doors and windows. Water lacks conscience -- leaves for us the responsibility of preservation. Uncle Ben left dead, left for dead like Mistuh Kurtz, he dead. Kurtz went native, naked to the world, costume shed to his darkness: Rat's coat, crow skin, crossed staves in a field. The jungle, the city, the river swelling beyond its banks. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world progresses, choking on its own dust, man with machine, without culture, with knowledge but no memory, no limits, made crazy by its own power, gadding about like the Green Goblin on his glider, wreaking havoc as we wait for Spider-Man to swing in for the save.