The ninja turtles are the greatest heroes of our generation.

Heart to heart, this isn’t nostalgia but stone-cold revelation.

Brother, in this time of polar shelfs eroding and coroners

combing the streets for dead girls’ bodies, I suggest all our heroes

rise in the future from the sewers of our torrid cities, renaissance

renewed from the filth of the underground and the litter of empty

pizza boxes, diapers, coke cans, hip hop and corrupt language;

COWABUNGA! At 12, I hoped Donatello would show up and take me

from the placid suburbs of Melbourne to the streets of New York

where a shared sense of casual hatred and social abandonment

permeated. Don’t think this poem is a riff on the allegory of minority

as mutant. I have no desire to look back in time and give a meaning

which otherwise doesn’t exist. What I’m talking about is a spell

you can set when you are 13 and 3 months old to call on superheroes.

It’s the one I used to summon Raphael when a kid stole my swimming

goggles at the local pool, his webbed feet catching on wet stone.

Another time my guinea pig Oscar went into epileptic shock

and Leo raced him in time to the vet. And I summoned them all

when my dad was in hospital, his heart having stopped working.

The beep beep beep of the nurse-call reminds me of the spell.

And when the turtles came they beat and fixed his chest

BEAT  BEAT  BEAT  BEAT. I’m running with them now

with nunchucks and swords whirling our way through the city.

Can you see us Brother? We are soaring through the streets grinning.

Cutting down our enemies in our path. Never lowering our gaze.