Duckback raincoat
Bata shoes
Camel ink
Hero pen
Nataraj pencils
I’ve reached a point
Where lists of things
Once familiar
Comfort me
But I don’t believe things are worse
The world
Was always burning
The skies
Were always red
And the end
Was always near
Near enough to smell
The burning
Of time
But with inkstains
On my fingers
And the polish scuffed
Off my school shoes
Band-aids on my knees
And a geometry box
Full of sharp things
And things to measure with
With inkstains on my fingers
And homework I didn’t want to do
With the polish scuffed
Off my school shoes
And endless shavings
From my pencils
With evenings spent
To soon
With rickshaw rides to school
Missing home
With ink stains
On my fingers
And my palms smarting
From the sting of a teacher’s cane
With scabs
On my knees
Shorts too small for me
By the end of the school year
In rickshaws
Or waiting for a bus
With the cold war
Freezing to a halt
The Berlin wall
smashed on TV
I almost believed
It was a good time
To be
That’s probably what I miss
But I don’t mind so much
Children are naive
Adults can reject hope
But I do like to think back
And recite a litany
Of shoes
And raincoats
And schoolbags
Pencils, pens
Stain of iodine on bloody
Knees
Before fractures
Before knowledge
And the litany ends
And I conclude
Knowledge hurts more
But is better
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy lives in Bangalore. He writes various kinds of corporate content for a living. He also writes fiction. He plays the bass guitar for a band and he and his wife Yasmine work for causes they believe in, support hordes of cats and dogs, and each other’s many dreams. Jayaprakash also maintains a sporadic blog at http://aaahfooey.blogspot.com