On This Particular Day
On this particular day
Batman had to get the Batmobile’s oil changed,
Wonder Woman was sweating through her Pilates,
Hulk was taking an online anger management course,
Mr. Stark was rolling out operating system updates,
Superman was shopping for Dr. Who style retro phone booths
and so on, down the list, everyone had
something better to do than Save the World, so
Saving the World was tabled for another day
aaand the villains continued running amok
aaand considerably more people died.
But since mass-amokings happen
every other particular day now
Nobody paid it much mind.
A pop-up alert on eighty million phones was quickly X’d away
by eighty million X-men and X-women and X-persons.
Maybe the news would report the casualty numbers
if a new body-count record was set or a particular incident
came particularly close to surpassing the current record holder
if it was a particularly slow news day
or not.
On this particular day
It all came down to one particular person
reading a particularly obnoxious (alleged) poem
that no one else in the entire world was reading
at that particular time and in their mind’s eye
a butterfly flapped its delicate bright wings
in a particularly consequential way so that
In the Pachinko game of their mind
the steel ball fell into the rarest catcher cup
and lights and bells and prizes ensued!
Next, oh yes, they did a very particular thing
that only they knew how to do in such a particular way
that messages and smart-phone dominoes fanned out in all directions
breaking a spell that had been cast on the Earth
by a particularly problematic band of source-errors.
Eighty million formerly ex-persons looked up from their devices.
Realizing they had no choice but to let go of whatever it was
they’d been waiting for as a sign to take the next step,
They just took that next particular step
such that all heaven broke loose
and the rest, as they say, is History:
books and songs and documentaries all written about
the exceedingly unlikely and deliciously momentous events
on this particular day.