Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize didn’t change my life

I was minding my own business in the top of the fifth

which means I didn't have to go to work at a day job, when

out of nowhere, or from the loop of television, or across the bold

print of the New York Times, or maybe via a couple of

FaceBook buddies, I was informed that Bob Dylan had won

the Nobel Prize for literature.

my thoughts immediately turned to my friend, unknown,

unpublished, starving in Cholula, writing the best

poems of his weary life about life in post war Mexico.

my friend, let’s call him: José Eldorado Esquivar,

sends me a bundle of poems every few months neatly scribed,

bound together with twine, not quite like Emily because

she hid her poems bound by ribbon (nice touch) in a secret

drawer at Amherst, whereas, José likes to get them out of his noisy

hacienda, asap.

here’s one José sent to me in a short-stack last month:

"the sun, she sets

over the puebla

and the donkey,

he drinks

from the shallow

pan where

the broken

tractor, it leaks

and my dog, he howls

at the sun

too stupid to know

it isn’t the moon."

now there's a damn good poem right there if you ask me.

anyway, I like that Dylan won the Nobel Prize.

I was there, in Newport in '65 when he moaned, electrically charged:

"I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more."

I neither booed nor cheered being too drunk on yards of beer, but

what it says is.. I've got skin in the game. but, christ.

It’s been over two hours and damn!

the tarp still covers the infield at Fenway.