The Rendezvous with a Road

Or The Collection of Suffering and Recovering in a Headlong Yet Roundabout Style After a Head-Breaking Accident on a Medieval Road But Which Is a Recollection With a Shortened-Title as Mentioned Above—That’s Abridged Because You Are Still Suffering and Recovering 


I’d have a rendezvous with my girl
The time, the place, they matter not but the meeting
But on a different tectonic plate in a different instant 
Never would I know I’d have had one with a road,
If I had anything to do with it, with the road
It would be, say, reading Kerouac’s On The Road and if not,
I’d pass by, travel on, ride on, walk up, go down
As in we do with roads in our everyday lives.
But then I found it was destined to be otherwise,
As in Frost’s The Road Not Taken
Literally not though, for it was all still a road
But which is usually not taken—that’s the road straight to a hospital
All bleeding, and in pain like a wounded and senseless puppy
And that was my rendezvous with the road.

Earlier I remembered I was riding my bike while leaving home
People told me the bike was ‘riding’ me when I was returning
Maybe they were telling me the truth
I remember the post-rendezvous things very unclear,
For all I knew I was hopping from one hospital to another
With the life left in me albeit unaware, I did recall bits and pieces
My nose affected with dreadful hospice-ish olfactory nightmare
My body, as if I had fallen down from atop the Nongmaiching
With reality stopping me by Naharup
Only that I was stopped and shackled there
Bedridden, and it was no less than being enchained
That was in one of the hospitals I know not which.

And as if the yin of my body had forsaken the yang
With one side smacked and bitten by the darling road
With a dozen of stitches on my head
Sewn in my favourite shape, that of a star,
I was then the ideal yet battered victim of an accident.

Amidst shitty flashbacks and ephedrine-less hallucinations
I recollected
In those post-rendezvous and smelly nose-provoked moments
Albeit the vision persisted to be as hazy as childhood memories
People coming in, going out, visiting, leaving, loitering around,
I felt nobody should be in a hospital
Nobody ought to be there
It’s such a freaking place,
But no, death is so certain yet we want to be alive
And as people sell lives to survive
And as hospitals thrive, some of them like hotels.
And others manufacture medicines to elongate life
And that’s a thousand WMD more important than the Americans
In their pursuit of manufacturing democracy in oil-rich countries.

Now, even in that bleary toleration I thought about road safety
But how would I know it would happen to me too?
Seat belts, helmets, driving slowly, avoiding rash driving
Those were supposed to mean for other people,
I assumed so; just nothing I know
—That was a cruel way of learning a life’s lesson.

Anyway, still in those instances, I knew I was alive:
Accidents are like those cement advertisements
That earthquake kills no people, but buildings do;
And an accident kills no people
People just got their time of living wrong,
When the bad Universe gives ud only two options
To live or die—the bad, bad Universe!
We can choose one and only one.

So, you may be late for a rendezvous
Even with your new, new girlfriend
But with accidents you got the atomic clock,
Delay is the last word in the dictionary of an accident
You are just there as you are supposed to be.
Accidents kill no people, but again the ironic time in it does,
These are as true as the excitement of meeting a new date,
In moments like those of life and death you do not lie.