bob dylan, king of the jews

the state of the union is not given by a television president

it is written on the walls of bathroom stalls

it is whispered in steam rooms and confession booths

it screams naked from our public foreskin:

we want our kinky freedom

we want our black jackie onassis

we want our box and our drug and our big nothing

we want fluoride in our tap water

we want words that mean and breathe

we want a poetic death for history

we want a capital t truth that goes down easy

we want a thoroughly cleaned and ghettoized pop culture

we want our badges and diplomas

we want our sacred minority and nuclear arsenal

we want our heathens and hedons

we want our robber barons and rugged individualists

we want our self-hate prophet

we want our bean curd minstrel

we want our free speech cage

we want our good cop and bad cop and white cop and black cop

we want our sexual predator and his yellow star

we want our mark chapman

we want our catchers in the rye

we want an apologetics of capitalism

we want our flat tax and castes of sin

we want our karma and jurisprudence

we want our hypothetical christian zion.

we want a homeric epic other than this horatio alger propaganda

but this is not greece

and we are not greek

if our generation has a bob dylan

he will be a plagarist or slandered as one

and we will make him wear his crown

and we will march him to golgotha

and we will lock him in a concrete mausoleum

engraved with his christian name.