For Alec Guiness
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Star Wars, starving hysterical naked,
Lining themselves up on the streets at dawn looking for a Star Wars fix,
angelheaded geeksters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high stayed up watching in the supernatural darkness of the theaters floating across the tops of cities contemplating Yoda,
who rotted their brains with the Force under the GL and saw Sith Lords appearing on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through toy stores with radiant eyes hallucinating Anakin and Obiwan lightsabers in hand playing Jedi battles,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the expanded universe,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underoos, wasting their money on action figures and comic books and listening to John Williams through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of Star Wars dolls ,
who ate C3P0s in paint hotels or drank New Pepsi in Modesto, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with dolls, with special editions, prequels and costumes and endless cosplays,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Celluloid solidities of halls, backyard green tree CGI dawns, mystical shit over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of R2D2 joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and Force vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Video, internet rantings and unkind darth light of mind,
who chained themselves to the street corner for the endless wait from Battery to holy Bronx on benzoylperoxide until the noise of Gungans and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of TPM,
who sank all night in CGI light of Naboo floated out and sat through the stale plot afternoon in desolate post-1999, listening to the crack of doom on the CD player,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists realizing the rape of youth and lies believed, and knowledge unseen had fueled the childhood star wars dream...
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of gungans and farts and yippee!
whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Lucasfilm factory to grind,
who vanished into nowhere Jedi Hell leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Lando Calrissian,
suffering Chi-Gone-Gin sweats and Tattoine bone-grindings and migraines of Neimodians under junk-withdrawal in the Wal-marts of their preconcieved notions,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the parking lot wondering where to go, and went, leaving nothing but broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in the alleys racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Force Jedi Taoism telepathy and bop yogananda because the universe instinctively vibrated when they viewd star wars,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary tibetan demons who were Obiwankenobis in their minds,
who thought they were only mad when their monitors gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the knute gunrays on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking yoda pez dispensers and followed the brilliant Scientologist to converse about the Force and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to insanity,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mount Doom leaving nothing behind but the shadow of Naboo and the larva and ash of George Lucas scattered in fireplace,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the XFiles in beards and shorts with big conspiritologist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the Midichlorian haze of Capitalism, who distributed antiGeorge Lucas pamphlets in Union Square weeping and wailing while the sirens of Mos Espa wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the also wailed Ralp Mcquarrie in his Wookie abode,
who broke down crying in in shock of Jefferson Starship and trembling before the TV of Life Day,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving plastic lightsabers and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly Lucasfilm execs, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the Jedi, caresses of Atlantian and Utopian love,
who played with themselves in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and movie theaters scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a special screening when the blond & aryan angel came to pierce them with a saber,
who lost their loveboys to the three old Jedis of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the midichlorian that winks out of the womb and the Yoda that does nothing but sit on his ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who collected ecstatic and consumed and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate Hasbro collection and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden howard the duck, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Toydarians and horrors of Master Races iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of George Lucas comics and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the blue harvest of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the poison stew of the Lucas imagination or digested the venom at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Skywalker Ranch,
who wept at the romance of the Jedi with their pushcarts full of toys and bad lines,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build millenniumfalcons in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of apatments crowned with flame under the fake posters surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night considering over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, 'reach out' 'let go' 'run'
who ate rotten candy just because Artoos head faced them while dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for a Jedi,
who threw their brains off the roof to cast their ballot for a galaxy far far away...& alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open comic stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel shirts on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the triumph of the will of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken womprats seeking revenge,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Yoda Jedi Master alleyways & mom's house, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on star trek fans, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of Meco Star Wars Disco finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the voice of Obiwan Kenobi in their ears,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch American graffiti incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to the premiere of a computer degenerated motion video picture showing them Heinrich himmler's wet dream...
who journeyed to Hell, who died in Hell, who came back to Hell & waited in vain, who watched over Hell & brooded & loned in Hell and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Hell is lonesome for her george lucas fans
who fell on their knees in hopeless jedi cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and dolls, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with rubber heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alderaan,
who retired to Dagobah to cultivate a habit, or Jundland wastes to tender Buddha or Coruscant to boys or Detroit to the black locomotive or Berlin to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the Director of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw pez chips at Lucasfilm lecturerson Joseph Campbell and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic prequel flaw, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the land of the bothans,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, buzzing and wizzing in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of lightsaber dreams, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally gone, and the last fantastic EU novel flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of star wars merchandise , a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Tolkien, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a Jediknighthood of tomorrows and utopian republics full of flying xwings
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images beamed by astromech droids, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Heinrich Himmler
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and unintelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to confirm THE GREAT LIE has been seen and understood...
the madman bum and Yoda elf in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and devil incarnate in the ghostly clothes of Obiwan in the goldhorn shadow of the menacing phantom and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last dvd player with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
YODA! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
YODA! YODA! Nightmare of YODA! YODA the loveless! Mental YODA! YODA the demon of medievel evil!
Lucas whose mind is pure machinery! Lucas whose blood is running money! Lucas whose fingers are ten armies! Lucas whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Lucas whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Lucas whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Lucas whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Hasbro whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Lucas whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Lucas whose love is endless oil and stone! Lucas whose soul is electricity and banks! Lucas whose poverty is the specter of genius! Lucas whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Lucas whose name is the Devil!
Lucas in whom I sit lonely! Lucas in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Lucas! Cocksucker in Lucas! Lacklove and manless in Lucas!
Lucas who entered my soul early! Lucas in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Lucas who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Lucas whom I abandon! Wake up in Lucas! Light streaming out of the sky!
!
They broke their backs lifting Lucas to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
This post has been edited by Hannibal: 26 November 2004 - 03:23 PM