Bob Dylan, Woke
I can’t help but digress
When Bob Dylan expressed
(And consider gender sexist),
“How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?”1
They say he was the voice of a generation,
A poet deserving of privilege
And a Nobel Prize in Literature.2
Step back and contemplate his self-portrait,3
The mask of woke; pick, choose, and pass.
And I look at myself and reflect,
That Bob Dylan’s self-portrait
Is just a reflection of myself.
***
References:
1 “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man”, from Bob Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind”, written by Bob Dylan in 1962 (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia).
2 In 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden.
3 Columbia Records record album cover, Bob Dylan, “Self Portrait”; released in 1970, Bob Dylan, painter. (photo, MoMA).
With your winds that screech
Wild so wild your winds and words rip the curtains
Stretching to reach me in the dark with fingers
that entangle my hair
Tornado
Rip the furnace from the floor of my basement
your teasing tornado desires
You want me now?!
You have no right to be here
Yet you come
Tearing the shingles from my siding
Ripping the siding from my sacred walls
You tear down the columns
and pull apart the shutters
Can you not respect the building of canyons?
These are my walls
Who are you to ask the grand canyon to do anything but be magestistic
If you had never put your head to mine
Had you never remembered how I slip in like silver
beside you
Had I never silkened your body
as you silkened mine
We could forget
Be left feeling nothing...
But
Like an album scracted
We replay...even after the console has been donated
We are ghosts..making love in the ether
I want to forget you
But you replay
and I stagger and tear...every time I think of you
and
I do think of you
Over and over again
I am a record album with a scratch
Circling back
Round and round
to the time you said
This must be a slow burn kind of
Love
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.