Super Dan Makes a Public Appearance

Super Dan, a pretty popular superhero who takes the front lines in a series of poems in Horn Section All Day Every Day is not conversant with the wiles of spirits, as David Kirby refers to in his blurb for my book in the post below this. Here's one of the Super Dan Question Box Series poems, and at its bridge you'll see for yourself Super Dan's encounter with elixir—

WHERE I COME FROM WE DO NOT RUN

              No man is a hero to his valet.

                 —Mlle. Aisse, Lettres

Super Dan: Where I come from we do not run

with crosswind. You did once

at the wildlife park, with the she-lion.

Hope was the two of you were bonding

from either side of the sixteen-foot

chain-link fence. When she stopped, you stopped, when

she pivoted, you pivoted. When she silently settled

into pounce-mode your memory

flipped back to twenty years

of housecats. The dilated eyes, two black saucers.

The shoulder muscles under fur, tense with the

exactitude of hard labor. The rubbing of her shoulder

blades a private encouraging undertone.

In you the blood fell to your feet

as an avalanche. Meat. But— 

she harbored no spite, no jealousy, no predetermined

disgust, didn’t favor your jeweled rings or lust

for your husband. You were merely

close enough to matter some.

But for that fence.

Or rather the four feet of it

she could not leap.

Just look at this human predilection for daredevil stunts—

motorcycle jumping over quarter-mile-wide canyons!

Or the enormous dirt arena

and the gigantic slapdash pile of junked cars,

and barreling smack into that pile 

another souped-up junk car dragging

a hay truck on fire!

Never will be the day

when one hermit crab says to the other

hermit crab, “Hey Joey, light my

shell on fire

and I’ll run into the sea.”

Super Dan receives hot chocolate

in a large steaming cup, then pours into it quite a bit

of a new superdelicious beverage not

available on his planet, something

creating a fondness in him, they call it Kahlùa—

At my home we accept we live until we don’t.

Even with what creeps us. Look at your world’s Komodo

Dragon with its man-dropping saliva, the brown

recluse violin-coifed spider, the primordial

scorpion, siren of hurt in its curved blond tail. The tail

itself a marvel of grotesque, agile as one human

index finger, the flexion, the extension, but—

for all their misgivings, they’re not out calculatedly

picking the lock of your home. A delicacy

set upon a silver platter

to them would be absurd excess. Eat

or protect. Unadorned

as the trundling, snuffling brown bear

on the pine hilltop, making the most

of the furrow in front of him.

It is not the bear on the hill with servant bears.

///

Originally published in The Los Angeles Review, 2013

Winner of the 2012 Red Hen Press Poetry Award

Judge: Jericho Brown

originally titled "Super Dan Comics Question Box Series #18"