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.

Some nights I spend sleeping
Other nights I’ll spend resting my head down on a keyboard
Drowning in updates and refreshing pages
Trying to find reasons for being up
so **** late
Lately, these nights that I worked a long eight hour shift
Waiting to escape retail in hopes
My friends aren’t busy, wanting to retell some stories
The nights my friends hop restaurant to restaurant

“We have no place to go"


We’ve been riding these desert streets for hours
Resurfacing our stories to heal our wounds
Or maybe our laughter only masks it
And we like to think it’s both

You can ride these streets as fast as you like, trying to forget,
but tonight,


we write
we ride
we eat
we share

tonight, the moon plays catch-up with us, it’s desert wonderers
the sun, tonight she’ll rest
tonight, the roadrunner
walked
crossed the street with a lizard in its mouth
looked me in the eye and swallowed it
The desert bird didn’t serve its name’s purpose
We’ve realized that sometimes, society, doesn’t serve it’s intentions


but when so
"we have no place to go"
We’ll turn parking lots into neighborhoods
Cars into homes, with kickbacks and house parties
Turn songs into poems
Become poetry ourselves
Become trilogies of our most battered loved lives
Find excuses for where the stars lie
And sometimes we’ll swear they lie in our ex’s eyes
And we’ll become what we don’t want to be in the dark

vulnerable


walking roadrunners


poets who don’t write

but in that moment, were just teenagers


"with no place to go"


We swear this summer is ours,
That growing up doesn’t have to be synonymous with change
That human beings aren’t equivalent to seasons
That poems actually can be never ending
if only we have the courage to
write the beginning

That Denny’s will always be a hotspot
Cafe’s are temporary
Dollar Menu’s are forever
We’re everything but hungry

Only starving
For inspiration in a wasteland
Unquenchable thirst for dreams of doing
something in empty parking lots
Trying to fill voids.

Tonight,
We replace our heartbreaks with these nights
The nights we walk across roads
Unknowing the other side, with lizards halfway down our throats

Tonight
We write, without looking both ways


~

I used to think lying down was therapeutic.
Well, I still do,
It's just that I recognize how comforting
Standing on my own can be
Looking above the ***** of dust
That litter the ***** tile underneath the bookcase
Allows an entirely new point of view
And ability to notice the picture frames
With pictures that hold so much action
In squares that don't move.
Before, those pictures were only to be seen
When a strong breeze came through the window
And knocked them onto the ground
But now, from this perspective
There's really no way to know
Whether the picture is hard to see because of the cracks after it fell
Or from you fading from my memories so much that even pictures are unfamiliar.
It's almost as if instead of a photo collection,
My newfound view has allowed me to stumble into a library,
One I created myself, but filled with stories of somebody else,
And just like the layer of dust that has made itself at home atop the glass screen of the frames
I have to blow on each separate page as I turn through
This vaguely familiar story
With characters I kind of recognize
And places I feel like I've been
And as I go deeper and deeper into the library
I begin to realize how many short stories are buried deep in the back corners
In comparison to the couple of epic poems that still lie wide open in the front
As if I had just finished reading them
Whether I meant to or not.
And with each row of books I find myself immersed in
I become more and more interested
and even though they're cloudy, the pictures my mind creates from the stories
Become more and more vivid inside my head
Almost jumping off the page
With characters so real I could imagine myself there
Which made a desire start to form rapidly and intensely inside of me
To write another book
Because when I look at the author of each of these books
Even their name sounds like a sound I've heard before
Something I've heard my whole life
And it makes me want to be like them
And create books like these myself
So while my conscious mind gently lets my body wipe the dust off these old photos
And finally put them away for good
My subconscious being lets me close down this library for good
And the two finally meet together at the coffee shop down the street from my house
And at the park across town
And at the local restaurant with friends who look like they might have been the ones in the pictures long ago
Who've already written dozens of trilogies since
And who invite me to become a character in theirs
And finally, I feel like there's a fresh new bookcase, and a empty camera roll that need to be filled
So the next chapter is finally here
And I'm excited to turn these pages for once.

Once I had a Trilogy-a curious little thing
it had but three tiny legs and a little wing,
it used to flutter round the floor, in a manner most amusing
and settle snugly on my lap when 'ere it felt like snoozing.
It's little eye would follow me as I went about my duties,
and all my friends admired it, for it had a curious beauty.
But now the little fellow's gone to a better place,
which abounds with Trilogies, that curious three legged race.

Fresh, sour,
Cowardly and brave,
All lives within.
Tales of fear and valour,
Novels that turn into trilogies that turn into mysteries.
None shall tell the tale.
Not mind,
Nor face,
Nor body.
I am life,
And I am a mystery.

In waking life I have a dream
of three slugs put to skull
this is a fantasy I'll admit
because only one would do the trick

in my dreams I find escape
calm is found with visitors
transients blurred by shifting scenes
seeming normal in nightly realms

then I wake from torpid bliss
find myself within the chains
ternary dreads await the soul
that drifts among the lucky ones

the sleeping hours ignore this theme
the trilogies are heavenly
with no taint of deepest angst
asking balm by three times fired.

© 2017. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved. 20170731.