In My Country of Bob Dylan
             

We bought a new car. It is blue.
There is a lot of leg room and my country is dying.

It is the country of my family and the country of Bob Dylan.

When I drove home in the car
I imagined he had died. On every radio station
the d.j.s played Girl From The North Country
for twenty six days straight. Everyone cried,

went out to the streets,
bashed their acoustic guitars to pieces,
collected shards of wood and made murals of Bob--
one huge collective mural that looked
like the map of America.

Later, some kids came with spray paint and graffitied their tags
all across the state of his nose, Florida.

And then someone drove across,
from Maine to San Luis Obispo,
in the spirit of Woody Guthrie,
in a brand new blue car
that might have been a Cadillac
but the Germans
had their fingertips all over the hood.

That was the end of my country.
No one had a thing to say and there was no protest.
Just a huge wooden mural of my country of Bob Dylan.

In the night time with no moon
the kids with lifted sweatshirt hoods came back
and poured their gasoline and lit their matches
on the state of Ohio
that was Dylan's hair.

The mural burned like magnesium
and it burned a million degrees
until the new blue car was a burnt red husk
in the middle of a crater
the size of Minnesota
in the state of Minnesota
and the whole country
was the rasp in the inside of Bob Dylan's throat
that couldn't get out.