dylan

 

dylan 

they all want wanted 

a piece of this poet

who they / we say is ours 

and ours alone 

be gone come here they cry

to his words in dust books haunted 

when the game’s afoot and hunted down

gawd why don’t they leave him alone

here in swansea his face is vaunted  

on the sides of vans and carts

with curls of hair and curls of smoke

he cockled their celtic hearts

but the counsel from the council

is to close his centre down

to peripheralise and marginalise

to slip the welshness of his crown

in the palaces that are the back bookshops

there are shelves and shelves of dylan books

but for the hoi polloi rushed in high street

they pull no second looks

they haul their hwyl to borderlands

and fling it in the face

of a world they sing down to

from this para-northern race

of a people that were chapelled 

were mined and steeled in fire

clinging to this his image 

if not his lonely words desire 

but to challenge ambivalence be hard

for it will bring down a dragon’s ire 

from yon ugly lovely populace

of a town built on the facade

of a nomad in feral verse

but dylan dylan bachgen bach 

a memorial that forgets its memory

stares simply into empty space