Love Sonnet With Piano Wreckage And Worms

My two favorite supervillains:

That’s Lex Luthor spending an afternoon sitting at one of his grand pianos playing Schubert’s “Impromptu No. 2 In E Flat.”

Talking to Lex, that looks like Lana Lang but it is only her body. She is possessed by the spirit of the seventeenth century French witch Isobel Thoreaux.

Isobel was only human. She didn’t have superpowers like Clark Kent, because he’s an alien creature from another planet. But because she cultivated her understanding of the powers of magic—and because the occult world is even more powerful than Superman’s superpowers—Isobel was able twice to almost defeat Clark. She never lost to him because his powers were superior to hers. She lost because even though she had clues to his connection to the stones of power—“And you think they were meant for you?” she asks him—she never realized that in fact they had been left for him and in fact they were the very key to his abilities.

Supervillains must never let down their guard, and they always must give consideration to even seemingly unthinkable contingencies.
 
Isobel possessed Lana Lang’s body again when everybody was in China looking for one of the stones of power. Only Isobel was smart enough to interpret the ‘map’ as a simple drawing depicting the location of the stone. When she recovered the stone, Clark tried to steal it from her. Isobel put out her hand and a ball of energy blasted Clark away and knocked him unconscious.

Supervillains take care of themselves.

from “Spell” and “Sacred”
Smallville, Season 4

If I were a supervillain who played
classical pieces on a piano
and loved a supervillain witch, I know
even if our villainous love were made

of operatic stuff, still, nerves get frayed
and at least once or twice a week or so
she would use her magic-blast hand to blow
my piano to bits in some tirade.

A piano here, a piano there,
is a small price, in supervillain terms,
for an operatic love to savor.

I’d keep fresh keyboards in stock everywhere
for this love, this witch, who’d go to the worms
rather than ask—allow!—me to save her.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



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