A villain on a pan-galactic scale,
Darth Vader was a monochrome cartoon,
a laboring lung within the grey whale
of his Star Destroyer. Victims would swoon
like failed crops in his wake, while he lifted
barely a metal-boned finger. No moon  
was safe from his sixth sense: he was gifted
with the Force. So why waste it all on rage,
why chop off the arm of your own son
and leave him to die among the garbage
of Cloud City, why blow up Alderaan?!? 
Vader could have been a galactic sage
but basked too long in the Emperor’s glow.
He had potential. He let himself go. 

Andrew Pidoux is the author of Year of the Lion (Salt, 2010). Recent poems of his have appeared in African American Review, Pacific Review, and Punchnel’s, stories in FishFood, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Turk’s Head Review, and comics in Forge and Wilderness House.