For Bruce Springsteen

for bruce springsteen... it was a rain-swept monsoon day way back then, so many moons away when i felt the music strumming in my veins setting me free like a runaway horse without any reins you sang of simple truths, your verse spoke to people just like me in my lonely, wasted, and desolately quiet night as you screamed out tragic human wrongs, and of everyone's plight 'bobby jean' spoke to me of that girl down the street glimpses of whom, we as innocents would furtively meet and 'the river' that flowed through my ever-barren heart led me down further roads of thunder when slowly i finally learnt that the hardest part was fighting on and never to surrender to the hard-luck dreams that were born to run while i danced in the dark with memories vivid and stark even as i whined like that dog who for forever lost his howling bark and then a 'human touch' came along and 'better days' seemed real, not just words in a song and still you sang and swayed and spoke straight into my unseeing eyes as gardens of secrets were opened, and as your fist punched the skies in an anger that i too felt and in whose cauldron i too burned as we saw murder get incorporated, while on its wobbly axis, our fragile world apathetically turned and then suddenly i was told that i was all grown up working on a highway of scattered ideals and absolving myself by sprinkling some coins in a waiting cup well, after all these years of walking along so many a thorny road with an armour of your verse covering me, even as i hear them taunt me and even as they continue to goad but now i can feel myself fading away, into the bleakness of this coming night just like the ghost of that old tom joad...