The night I was struck by lightning,
I awoke with ordinary powers
the likes of which the world had seen before.
I could manipulate sound waves to
make other people hear my thoughts.
I could generate heat, even on the coldest days.
When I turned 13, I discovered I could extinguish
at least 13 flames with a single breath,
and with another breath, make campfires burn hotter.
With practice, I even learned how to transfer my breath
to a drowning man, and start a heart beating with my bare hands.

The day of the science field trip,
I was bitten by a spider,
and my latent human abilities manifested
in ways I'd never dreamed.
As a child, I stepped on a caterpillar
and discovered I had power over insects.
In high school, I turned invisible.
My first kiss turned me tangible.
My first break-up, I learned my heart can heal
from wounds as open as outer space.
My cells fully regenerate every seven years.
I am in my fifth body.
As far as I know, I am bulletproof.

I was born on a dying world, packed into a lonely cradle,
and crash-landed on my home planet,
full of fantastic creatures and hostile natives.
I learned I could make my mother materialize by calling out her name.
When she died, I learned I could achieve mortality.

People of Earth, I have time-travelled here from the year 1982
to tell you I have not come alone;
that we walk among us, we freaks,
born to a world that hates and fears us,
constantly bombarded with cosmic radiation,
we shape-shifting apes,
grandchildren of the amoeba,
ancestors of a future race of spacemen.
By night, we travel to a bizarre alternate universe
unbound by physical laws,
to do battle with monsters wearing our friends' faces.

And by day, we put on our normal suits
and pretend we are normal,
that we cannot hear the distant cries for help,
or the heartbeats racing in the liars' chests.
We keep our true identities a secret in our citizen costumes,
knowing we have the power to save the world or destroy the planet,
that we can rescue others by making hands appear in our fists
and eventually we must
because within each of us is a force too great
to be contained in mere skin,
that wants to push and build and comfort
and pilot the good that is the atom of the Earthling soul.
We must realize we possess incredible powers
that only seem ordinary because they are common to us all,
because with ordinary powers comes an ordinary responsibility
so heavy on our giant shoulders:
to be beyond what we believe we were born to be,
more human than humanly possible.