Love and Lust this December

I’ll never be as true as what your heart had sought

But then you, in the heat of my love, are ought

To embrace my love loaded lust this December

For even the sadness in your brown eyes so somber,

All I see, is you, melting like a happy candle in my arms

Burning itself to a sad seductive smugness that, neither of us, harms.  

Desire

The stakes, I know, are higher than ever

But, in the cold of the night, I shall still shiver

In spite of the frosty passion of your bland body

For your love, in my honour, is but a cruel parody

I need to feel and embrace time and again

Like a restless child wanting to get wet in the rain

Aware, in full measure, of his mother’s scorching rage

But, more so of the burning desire to break out of the cage.

The Driver

He woke up as he always did in the morning

Misty and cold yet for him waking

And boiling some water in the saucepan

Bought in the Sunday Haat by his wife from a man

Known to be a philanderer who drank too much,

For tea and some to bathe was no longer a problem as such.

For years, though, he didn’t remember how many exactly

He had been doing the same day after day and at precisely

Seven as the wall clock in the right wall of the only room

In the house showed with a somewhat occult doom,

He took out the car parked on the verandah he and his

Family shared with three other families the men of which were neither his

Friends nor foes as for either he didn’t have time to waste

Though he knew one of them, the oldest, was not half as chaste

As his (and the others’ too he believed) wife thought him to be

For once, he had seen her with a local lady having tea

And smoking at a place and time he had no business to be.

Driving up the slope thinking who for the day were his passengers gonna be;

(Not that he cared; he had seen all types)

The ones from the big city who’d come for the hypes

That had been built up by the government of late about

Smaller towns and even smaller villages a small way away though doubt

All of them would always about the accuracy of all the superlatives

About the places being wettest to cleanest and the others- natives

From the nearest city in the plains to simply escape the heat

Or just to after a long week’s work cool their feet,

He took out with his left hand from his grey

Trousers’ pocket the paper, which would say

Where his passengers for the day were to be picked up

From and before which he could have his second cup

Of tea and buy his day’s stock of cigarettes and kwai

And brace himself for the day on a mental high

As the first day he had driven a car and instantly

Decided that this was what he would do incessantly

Till the day he could hold a steering and press a clutch.

And in his career of two decades (at least), from a dopy Dutch

To a motor phobic film actress whose name he always forgot

He had driven in a career, unscathed so far ,the whole lot.

But today is a new day and the lake is placid

And the horizon is, for a change, vivid.

On the Man who was more than a Man to me.

The river can’t cry for the tears will never dry.  However, on a fateful evening of November, the couples holding hands on the Uzanbazar riverside did see a few more ripples than usual. The mighty river, nonchalant and blasé now from all the turmoil it has witnessed over the years, has finally broken down. Like a father who had not shed one tear when his wife died, in the belief that his son would love him even more, only to see him dying in front of his own eyes- the river is sadder than anyone of us can dread to be. The lights, as I write, from the Nabagraha and the Kamakhya hills are probably shining on the river in their comatose splendor but beneath the ostensible glitz, a father is silently sad as only a father can be.

The XXX Rum bought from a theka that stays open later than it’s supposed to  near the railway station of the small non- descript town I live in, far away from where the man wrote his poetry and composed his music has got to my head and I’m happy about it, not because I believe the rum will speak better than me, but because I think my incisor, still very active, will incise better about this very surreal phenomenon of a person  who wrote poems about the river and the people around Him and gave them music, in the process composing anthems for an entire community of people who believed the mother they were born off was wronging them, if it has some black rum warming its inherent taciturnity. 

I am pretentious. I don’t even understand most of his poetry. But when he sings about the river, I feel so Axomiya, all I want to do in life is sit by the river and write poems about Him. The lights on the river will grudgingly whimper off soon; most of them already have- people will make love anyway; the adventurous will keep them on and the shy will switch them off. I drank cheap rum too, not to grieve him, but because tonight’s a Saturday and he’s to be celebrated not mourned. To the man who loved his whiskey and poetry; to the man who thought life was to be lived king size; to the man who loved the river like his father; to the man who made a whole generation of Marlboro smoking Pink Floyd worshipping write poems, no one would ever read, about the great river.

In the redness of the perfumed rum

I can feel  you,  your magical voice, hum

A ballad, which the Kuli  secretly whispers, is about me

As the Kopou blossoms, forlornly, to thee.

RIP Bhupen Hazarika.

Note: The masculine references to the river’s because the Brahmaputra is considered to be a male river. Kuli is Assamese for the Cuckoo and Kopous are orchids. Him, if not evident enough, also refers to the river.