Lightsabers and blasters
Jedi and Sith
Snow Speeders and AT-AT's
CURSE YOU REBEL ****!
Let's blow up the Death Star!
Dagoba awaits!
Use the force Luke
There... is... another...
Leah...
LEAH????
Ewwwwww she kissed him!
No. I. Am your father!
Whaaaaaaaat!?
Never tell me the odds!

Maybe the reason why I haven't watched Star Wars yet is not because I'm uninterested to start watching it, but because I'm waiting for someone to watch it with. Maybe a Star Wars geek, particularly.

And he'd tell me jokes with a Star Wars reference and at first I'd blankly look at him, but after watching I'd laugh with him.

Maybe we'd get lightsabers and play with it together.

Maybe, just maybe.

who the hell doesn’t want to be a Jedi
seriously you can control the force and **** siting  
on you couch playing cod all you want is the Mt due in the fridge an don't want to get up
force that **** over to you
like really come on you think this stuff is for nerds
no its not don’t think for one seconded that you didn’t liked something nerdy
hid it from your friends *** they thought it wasn’t cool because you have
you may not remember but you did.
there had to be a moment were you wanted to be a Jedi or join the rebellion or even the empire.
But now you all act to cool for ****
why not go back to you child hood and remember how much fun you had
playing lightsabers, wands and Nurf stuff
also when you came upon an automatic door an acted that you used the force on it
am I right or am I just a fool
I know every generation had their wish to be’s.
Maybe you weren’t a WARS fan
maybe you were a Treckie
or one for the Doctor and his big blue box
or a Wizard with an owl
but at least once in your life you were a nerd
or a fanboy or a fangirl over what you saw as the coolest thing.
Now once again who da hell wishes they were a fracking Jedi,
star fleet officer, a companion of the Doctor or even a student of Hogwarts
Raise yo hand now.

they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
so think of it like this:
do you know who marcia lucas is?
it’s okay if you don’t.
there’s a reason for that,
until a few months ago i didn’t know her name either.
but you probably know who george lucas is.
biographer dale ******* once said that marcia,
george lucas's first wife who he was married to throughout
the production of the original trilogy,
was his “secret weapon."
and the operative word in that sentence is secret.
because i have been watching star wars
for just about as long as i can remember;
growing up, my brother and i owned not only
half a dozen plastic lightsabers and a box set of both trilogies,
but my dad even likes to mimic yoda’s voice and speech patterns
when he gives me motivational life talks.
but i never once learned marcia lucas's name.
i know star wars super fans who can spout out more trivia
about wedge antilles,
an x-wing pilot with 2.5 total minutes of screen time in the entire saga,
than marcia lucas,
the women who edited the film together
into the cultural phenomenon we know.
marcia lucas is the woman who edited starwars
from a mess into a masterpiece.
the woman who has be described
as the “warmth and heart of the films”
who carved out her husband's characters into people
and developed with much of emotional resolution of the series,
coming up with the idea of killing off ben kenobi
when george lucas couldn’t resolve the plot line himself.
her fingerprints are all over these movies,
she shaped these stories and us with them
yet we never talk about her hands cutting the film.
the woman who edited the scene
where luke skywalker destroys the death star
from a 45 minutes crawl into the fast-paced moment
when the good guys win,
the woman who sewed together
the magic we watched on our screens
is nothing more than a footnote in the credits.
she has been erased from the narrative.
and as i write this poem,
i know that only some of you will never think of this name again.
and if you do it will probably be as trivia,
a fact to spout in a conversation about george lucas
or while you pop in a new hope into the DVD.
but sometimes you have to think about how many people’s lives
end up on the cutting room floor.
they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
margaret hamilton is the lead software engineer
whose work took apollo 11 to the moon.
do you know her name?
you know the man on the moon but not the woman who put him there.
sybil ludington road twice as far as paul revere
to warn the local militia of the oncoming british attack,
fending off a band of highway robbers as she did.
do you know her name?
long before little richard and chuck berry
were ever even strumming at their guitars,
sister rosetta tharpe was pioneering a genre
with the first album ever labeled as rock’n’roll.
do you know her name?  
rose mccoy wrote the words to the song “i beg of you”
that elvis presley crooned,
along with countless more that other people sang.
do you know her name?
do you know any of their names?
maybe spotlights cast more shadows than they give off light.
we are a culture of people who forget everything out of sight.
they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
we just... don't know her name,
no one ever bothered to teach us her name.
no one was supposed to.
history is not always about who you remember,
sometimes it is about who you forget.

You are not my sunshine.
You are my whole sun
In all it’s ****** glory.

Your hair is just like your feet.
It never knows which direction it's going in.
And the only thing bigger than your brown eyes,
Are your little arms when you hold them out to your sides
Reading "Pick me up!"
You can't talk yet, but I hear you say so many things.
We named you Faith.
Which is ironic because it's something
This family is lacking.
I swear all your brothers hate each other
I'm one ***** on the neck away from moving out
And your parents are one sigh away from saying
"Let's just call it quits."

You're not even one and we've cheated you out your childhood
Like when a man cheats on his wife
We didn't really know how much heartbreaking we were fixin' to do.
It's unfair.
It's unfair how you're the only one who still smiles in these hallways
In the hallway, there's this big gray smudge that covers the wall
From when my baby brother decorated it with Crayola's
And my mom spent a week trying to get it off
But she never could.

In my opinion, that's the best ******* family portrait we are ever going to paint!
It's proof history can never be erased, no matter how much try to get rid of it, or ignore it
It's a ******* to the perfect white walls of a "perfect" white family
The dark smudge on the walls is the writing my parents will never see
The fact that it's still there after three years is proof,
That you can never stifle a child's creativity.
It's the worse excuse for a family portrait
But this house sure as hell isn't perfect in the inside.

I rather come from a broken home than be in one.
I rather remember this house when it was at it's best and leave
Then live a day to day reminder that it's never going to be that way any more.

I swear the last time my brothers and I got along was when I was five
And we pretended they were my puppies and I would feed them scraps form the table
Kids do weird **** sometimes.
Or when we'd walk around in our underwear and bathrobes
Pretending to be jedi knights with toy lightsabers
Walking around the house like it was our planet to protect.
And pretty soon I'm getting on the first rocket off this planet I can find.

The only thing that holds me back is that I feel like
I'm cheating you out one less older brother.
Trading my sister for an education and a paycheck.
A reality check.
That I can't be a kid forever.

But promise me you will try.
Promise me that whenever I come home you always will
Still have your arms outstretched wide open
Promise me you'll make mistakes and draw on walls
And explore your own planets
And that you'll be okay exploring them without me.
Promise me that when you're old enough to understand this poem
You'll write me back.
Promise me you'll be patient with mom and dad
Even though they seem like they aren't
Trust me. They're trying.
Trust me.
We named you Faith for a reason.

My father's father was never the best sort of person. Once
He gave me a necklace. It was a pink crystal
On a single black cord. I never liked it much,
And cannot say why I wore it, but I can still see
His thin frame, sick even then, with that white
Surprise of hair shooting out like a cloud from his head,
Aged eyes hidden by dark glasses (the refusal to grow old),
Folding in half to sit next to me on the robin's blue eggshell
Porch, and me rubbing my feet still against the concrete steps
As my brothers dueled with lightsabers across the dead July grass.

I can only grasp at the few other things that I remember about him-
The smell of cigarettes & alcohol clinging to the walls of the guest bedroom;
His sunken face (soul gone for hours yet);
and the oxygen machine into which he breathed his last. His funeral
was a circle of strangers, standing
Somewhere out in the woods around his jar of ashes.
Someone, probably my father, played a song on his guitar,
Bittersweet notes echoing and echoing through the September of the trees.

It's a song we sing at camp, in the summertime,
And by the time its last note is just a whisper,
I excuse myself and slip away to look up at the stars and because
I can still feel my own life force fading into the night, like his ashes-
The last fragments of a shattered life,
Left to the mercy of the northern wind.

Like cigarette burnt to the stub,
Like an empty bottle of Jack,
      Kinda the way it's been.
Like reruns of Seinfeld on a Saturday
    1a.m. slot.
And nobody notices, yeah my days
Have been like that.
     Like bloggers on a subject like
Star Wars and little
Pimple faced teens arguing lightsabers....
     Pertinent subjects have lost
Their way out of my life.
      There is a whole lot of nothing,
But like cigarettes burnt to the stub and
     An empty bottle of Jack,
Like days fading on a memory card
With 300 pictures,
      And the ashes that get swept
Just this side of the puke
Of the armchair.

We in South Florida pride ourselves on getting hit by hurricanes. We take photos of how bad it is and post it on Instagram with appropriate doomsday event hashtagging.

Riding these things out is like riding a bike.

If you can shop for Black Friday and Christmas every year, you can shop for this. Take pride in your water divination skills and line-standing endurance feats. We are the state of Disneyworld ride lines that wrap around corners in swamp heat, and lines of red light bumper lights on i-95 Monday through Friday: this is another day in the office!

Putting up shutters is like putting up Christmas decorations: we get creative

Like today, we wedged pink and blue floatation noodles against the frames of the windows in arcs resembling a post-storm rainbow. My 2 year old daughter said it was beautiful.

One day of this is someone else's seven months of winter. Remember, people evacuate to here annually! So do not feel bad for fleeing north to them.

The news keeps saying stay calm as they embellish how dangerous this storm ride is going to be like some death stunt on a David Blaine TV special. He went underwater in "Drowned Alive": he didn't drown. He got buried underground: he rose from it. Per the broadcasted hype, the payoff is we won't die!

Here's some good news: you can leave what's out of reach and in the sky to the heavens, and what's in your mind to the steps you took on the ground below: all doors closed, stuff unplugged, things that resemble missiles stashed in closets, flashlights ready like lightsabers to battle this named foe from above. It will hit the worried and unworried just the same, revealing the gas station line cutters from the people who help you with shutters; the faith from the fear of those who choose to pray; the human heart and its varying sizes as it beats faster with the darkening of the sky.

At least we aren't trees: they cannot hide from this revealing event. See how they all remain serene up until the second the wind arrives, leaves rattled only then, roots of varying depths being that which holds them together

either they bend with grace or they break.

I live in the first century of the clone wars
most morning we’d wake up swiping up.
the new papers don’t arrive no more
because the news pours out of various device
interrupting morning thoughts, selling
us products to own more.
we think sophisticatedly but stay
closed off.
happy to be clones, to be sold love.
living vicariously through actors, models
or influencers who show more.
we think they are intelligent, they brave enough
assuming they know more.
consider the singular ways we live
consumed by our individualism, our greed.
consider the trees
and the many people who
puff this **** to cope on.
each year, iPhones get expensive
while screen light darkens the truth.
I rarely write with a pen if i don't have autocorrect
but I am a graduate, a grown up.
I am reconciling with this spell
from upon which i proceed
but this war still goes on.
imagine we find each other, then construct
mutual peace instead of flashing lightsabers
because we are so tough.
imagine we say our piece
while pinning respect on our sleeves,
then step out the street to hold hands.
its only the first century of this clone war
yet we are exhausted, from everyone
being so right and i wonder if we ever
gon slow down.

The first time I walked into my home was when I was five,
My mom and her best friend Louise signed me out of school,
we ate McDonalds on the hardwood floors and looked at the bare walls,
they were actually blank canvas's, waiting for life's pictures to be painted upon them.

When I was eight, my sister and I got into a fistfight,
in our shared room, a mere five feet away from my parents.
They knew it was time for us to have separate rooms,
and they turned an old den into a makeshift room that night,
where my sister would sleep until her teens.

I remember Sunday mornings,
stumbling down the stairs with sleep in my eyes,
and hearing oldies playing on our stereo,
smelling a big breakfast cooking.

I remember Monday mornings,
procrastinating to come downstairs and face the Canadian winter weather,
my mother getting ready for work,
but not before making us toast even though we never had an appetite in the morning.

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

I spent countless days and nights in my first room,
always an introvert, always alone with my imagination.
It went from playing with Star Wars action figures,
to playing guitar, to writing poetry,
and eventually when computers were the big thing,
I spent my teen years playing xbox and downloading music.

Some nights I drank in that room.
Most nights I smoked countless joints and cigarettes.
A few times I even did mushrooms,
paranoid the entire time my mother would open the door and question me,
but usually she was more concerned about the candles I lit to cover the smoke,
100% certain I would light the house aflame.

My sister eventually moved into the basement,
the same one where we would sit on the rough carpets,
far too close to the TV,
playing Legend of Zelda, and Greenday's "******" blaring in my ears.
I'm still half deaf till this day.

I remember falling asleep outside,
rocking back and forth on our cushioned swing,
surrounded by greenery and sun,
bird chirps intermixing with my mp3 player.

I remember my modest above ground pool,
and my sister teaching me how to swim at six,
only taking breaks when she would attempt to drown me.

My sister moved on and I moved into the basement,
and spent an entire weekend painting and making it my home.
Bright green paint with lilac purple,
and posters of Sid Vicious, illuminated by lightsabers.

My mom got sick with Cancer,
and I remember sitting in the living room while she cried,
telling myself she would be ok,
that she would live even against impossible odds.

I remember coming home from overnight shifts at the women's shelter,
lying on the shaggy carpet and watching her with half lidded eyes.
"I'll go to bed soon."

A week before Christmas my mother moved into the old den,
the one my sister moved into when we were so young,
so she'd no longer need to go up the stairs.
The same stairs we used to slide down on with pillows.

I would lay awake in my basement, listening to her footsteps,
the same footsteps that used to wake me up far too early.
Now keeping me awake and on edge,
ready to run up to her in case she needed help.

I remember Christmas morning,
how the walls echoed "she's gone" and "call the doctor."
How my father sat at the living room table, pouring himself drink after drink,
how my sister lay on the couch crying,
and I, trying to make my mother proud, cleaned the house.

I was alone for years,
in a house that wasn't a home,
my mother dead, my sister moved out,
my father taking anything of value to his new home, with his new girlfriend,
a woman who shares the same name with my mother.
But not the same heart.

I stayed in my basement,
getting high and writing poetry,
listening to music so there would be another voice but mine.

The first time my wife walked into my home,
she surveyed the damage done to the house and made it a home again.
A nice mixture of our belongings now mix with my mothers,
keeping her memory alive in every room.

We spent many nights in candlelight, inlove, laughing,
and again the house had life and love in it.

This summer my home will be sold,
and in a matter of months this little 50's house will be destroyed.
Our medium sized lot will make room for two modern buildings,
and the twenty-three years spent here will be demolished.

There is mold in the basement,
the electrical is gone to ****.
The drywall is crumbling, the paint is scratched,
and the plumbing is sketchy at best,
but this home will always stand strong in my heart.

Force visions like a dream
Knighted awakenings through Jedi conquest
Council round tables that serve to protect
Though some minds are subject
To be manipulated and left to resort
To darker prospects

Discourse of a Sith
Internal infection
Darth plagues that cover the brave
Leaving their lightsabers broken
As they bow their heads in shame
Their wills of light, unspoken

The Force is strong
It's our choice to be the one
That it belongs.

I see you sitting there with a thumb in your mouth
and you wonder why the words wont come out.
The kid's too stout - he's too proud - too loud.
The type to carry around a pouch of sauerkraut
then pout when everything tastes south. Outstanding!
He's damming the river to prevent the peasants from swimming,
and doesn't realize the only thing keeping him afloat is down below.
Hello? Turn them sky highs into clout, boy- make it snow!

Lord of the purple prose - (what does he mean) who knows?
Not me - I'm too busy dwindling the last of the rations;
irrationally casting matches at a long list of parched cabins.
How can you expect me to feed in an orderly fashion?
I didn't reach the top link to eat without sending a message.
Savage patch kid wielding lightsabers for utensils -
We're a rare breed bred into existence to resist all that is vintage.
Equipped with shark fangs and griffon wings,
we're here to free the underlings from redundent sufferings.
Please excuse the reign, it follows me wherever I go
like a little lost dog caught up under my toe,
gravitating towards my end-all deathblow.

with every breath you take you inhale a part of my soul
atoms lifting off my face through your windpipe in layers shed like graphite
dyson vacuums are amateurs compared to you
**** me off
black holes don't **** like you do
who ever wants a brainfreeze keep ******* cause you got nothing on her
i get turned on and then you **** me off
i give your oral presentation a B-
the breeze on my pole liberates all tension
i am ***** as buildings have balconies
i am ***** as kites catch wind
i am ***** as pens drip fine, bold, rich ink from their well crafted, metallic, ornamental tips  
i bust all my bad habits on to you, you make sure they never hang around too long, not to get affixed  ...just a taste satisfies
you go as deep as the magnificent swimmers of the ocean
you go as deep as lightsabers do through rebel ****
you go as deep as words cut the pillars fortifying self esteem monuments
nice.

I see letters float before my eyes, form words when I struggle to get them out
Little and a lot, millions of worlds form in my mind
Worlds with knights and dragons, ones with spaceships and lightsabers
And those where a hand reaches out to meet mine

I dare not shut my eyes, even as torpor sets in to counsel
A mosaic of bittersweet memories decorate my delirious porch
Heat courses through my blood, away from my heart
The sweat on my forehead feels like a familiar touch

My fantasies are real as long as I endure this stupor
Imagined reality is what I should live for
Love for
Because there, we're together.

Daydreams drift into vivid memories,
shadowed thoughts of "remember when"
grow bright with a gasp
as I dip my feet into the icy river.

The new road used to be old riverfront
and the only travelers were ducks and geese.
We skipped school and skipped rocks,
chased each other with lightsabers
made of twigs and fishing twine.

I flex wrinkled toes and dig further
into the cold sand, feel the pulse
of the river mingle with my own.
A toy boat flounders on the shore,

its torn sail flapping in the breeze.
I rescue it from the rocks,
patch it up with twig and twine
and set it free.