God and I had a good laugh about that one.
—John Ashbery
Cyclotronic Man had briefly become
a very loud
superhero.
Ominous explosions were being reported
all along the Northeastern
coast – “10 to 20 times
louder than a sonic boom,” kept repeating on the teevee,
a New England reporter on the evening news
simply quoting a guy
who swore his
eardrums were bleeding, the reporter’s astonished
look, the repetition of that look and the
quote on the clip that went viral, then meme.
All the way out San Francisco, jaundiced kids were
glued to their screens
even more than
in the way they usually were.
D.C.’s disappeared hero had gotten lost somewhere
just a ways out past
Feedback Loop,
only to then find himself
(Oh, how he’d always wanted
to awaken one morning to find himself!)
stuck in some sort of
echo chamber, stuck
among (betwixt? amid?) the incessant echoes
as if it were a low-bellied and gargantuan
swamp filled with
nothing but a dense sonic
quicksand.
Up at headquarters
the search party was naturally dispatched too late.
All night long,
reports were streaming in from
up and down the Jersey Shore by
the hundreds. From mortals who’d
apparently heard and felt Cyclotronic Man’s
bloodcurdling cries for help –
and then – after nearly two solid hours filled with those,
a deafening silence, until finally
Ahoy there, Cyclo!!? Ahoy!!? And that was it.
Meanwhile, up and down the vomitories
of nearly three dozen theatres
built here and there upon the horizons of the
Original Thirteen, halfcocked teenage
heads were gliding in the dark, mid-air,
bodies pacing back and forth,
each with ears attuned for the call of their
names to the stage for their auditions as:
Third Tier Superhero’s Love Interest.
