Photo by weston m on Unsplash

I have been playing about with some poems lately. I wrote this after seeing the new Bob Dylan movie a few hours before the storm hit home.

Spear

The night of the great storm,
the film gave shelter.

But underneath its eaves, the past came back.

Dylan is a prophet, so some have said. He was there at the start of the world, he’ll be there at its end.

A young man on a motorbike
wearing sunglasses at night.
A young man with a guitar
looking like you’re the only thing right.

He’ll betray you in way you’ll treasure.
Sharing a cigarette through a chain-link fence
like some kind of epic, like some kind of decadence.

A spear to the gut
That’s what love is,
That’s what youth is.

A spear to the gut.
You’re lucky in your suffering
if that’s what you got.

See you soon, babe.
You can say this to anyone.
Someone you love, someone you hate.

You can say it to yourself, even.
But it won’t be true

You can’t see yourself again.
You can’t be young anew.
Life rushes by in its lonely way.

Music offers shelter
but it comes at a cost.
It will puncture you
with all you’ve lost

And yes, you’ve gained, you surely must allow.
Even the prophet knows he’s younger than that now.

But sometimes, you have to say,
I used to be like that. And now I’m not.

Subject to the rolling stone
Subject to no direction home
Subject to the pill-box hat
Subject to ideas like that.

Subject to a motorbike
a guitar
a young man
a dream
one more cup of coffee before you go or he goes, or you both go, or you can’t remember.

Subject to

a future like the open road.