Superman Suite: Lex Luthor

Wake up 5:45.  Dry toast.  Lap in the pool.  

Scotch rocks.  Kiss the picture of my mother.  

I build a vacuum that can pull the sun closer

to the Earth and ice machines that only 

I can run.  I wait for him on a mountain

in a two thousand dollar suit.  Reporters ask

what my father would think and I say

he doesn’t think.  He is dead.

Wake up 5:45.  Dry toast.  Lap in the pool.

Scotch rocks.  Kiss the picture of my mother.

I travel back in time and he beats me even 

as a baby.  I tell no one.  I summon beings

from the fourth dimension, all wings and 

points of light instead of faces.

I wait for him in the desert where

I have built the driest, darkest storm.

Wake up 5:45.  Dry toast.  Lap in the pool.

Scotch rocks.  Kiss the picture of my mother.

I shrink myself small enough to travel 

in his blood in my krypton suit.  I give him

the most perfect king-sized cancer.

I wait for him behind his boy scout eyes.

The reporters ask why I do it and I don’t bother 

with the truth—that we need the muck to claw 

out of over and over, that we do not need saving.  

But I can’t explain man to these morons.

Wake up 5:45.  Dry toast.  Lap in the pool.

Scotch rocks.  Kiss the picture of my mother.

It’s lazy Sunday, so I make a stupid suit

out of steel and saw blades.  It lasts only

thirty seconds but it is hysterical.

I let him save my life so I can muss his hair.

I have my clone take my wife to dinner, 

that place she likes so much.  The clone gets

the pork belly and I can taste its ghost.

My wife asks if I have lost my mind.

I am no more crazy than a lunatic, I say.

Wake up 5:45.  Dry toast.  Lap in the pool.

Scotch rocks.  Kiss the picture of my mother.

It is one of the times he stops me before 

I even start, before I have even thought

the scheme through with my grapefruit and

graph paper at that table on the terrace.

There is a smirk and there is a fist,

that strength that is so maddeningly polite.

The man at the dry cleaners wakes me 

from a stand-up sleep to ask if I am tired.

I am too speechless to smart ass an answer.  

I am as tired as a grave, of course, too tired 

to stop, as tired as the last earthling on Earth.

---

JOSH HUMPHREY was born and bred in Kearny, New Jersey.  His career as a Librarian, which is into its second decade, has been the source of much poetry in his life.  Recently, his poems have been published in the Light Ekphrastic, Paterson Literary Review, US1 Worksheets, Innisfree Poetry Journal and Oberon.  He has upcoming work in Twin Bill.

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