This is a piece I wrote for the inaugural WordCrawl. Clark Kent wasn’t there, but I showed this video to him later and I think he approves.
Clark Kent is my boyfriend.
You might find this hard to believe
because you probably don’t think
Clark Kent actually exists,
and I don’t blame you.
But I assure you, he does.
He doesn’t wear glasses these days
and when he speaks, only I can see
the word bubbles float
like low hanging fruit
above his head,
so other people don’t usually recognize him
as being Clark Kent.
Without those, he appears to be just
another ordinary man.
Only I know his true identity.
When we sleep in the same bed
I don’t always drift off right away.
Most people don’t know this about Clark Kent,
but sometimes he snores,
and it keeps me awake.
When I stay at his apartment overnight,
I make coffee the next morning
with his very modern, very convenient
single-serving coffee machine.
The kind with individually packaged
pods in all sorts of different flavours.
There’s something for everyone.
It is an amazing invention,
a product of the convenient, single-serving
lives we live here on this particular part of Earth.
Nothing like what Clark Kent might have
used if Krypton hadn’t burnt to a crisp
and he didn’t ever have to leave.
I think the coffee pods would remind Clark Kent
of how lonely single-serving life was
after that heartless bitch Lois Lane
up and left him at the very moment when
Doomsday came and he needed her the most,
except that I’m his girlfriend now and so
sometimes if I’m awake in time
I make us both a pod
and we drink them together
before he leaves for work.
My boyfriend Clark Kent writes the news
for The Daily Planet, the best newspaper in town.
I enjoy this fact about him.
I enjoy that he’s a writer, like me.
Clark Kent understands that words
are more powerful than anything.
Everyone thinks Clark Kent’s dream job is to be a superhero,
but he told me it’s actually to be a novelist.
He makes his living writing stories about the criminals
here in Metropolis, the murder capital of Canada.
Clark Kent has seen some really horrible shit on the job.
Homicide scenes.
The remains of violence.
Sometimes I wonder if he sees it in his sleep,
playing on the back of his eyelids,
although he says he doesn’t dream.
Rumours float around
that my boyfriend can leap tall buildings
in a single bound.
I’ve yet to see him do it,
and that makes no difference to me now.
They’re all looking for Superman,
but Clark Kent is the man that I found.