it's so hard to translate childhood: i can't
put my money where my mouth is because
my mouth is teething. it's growing words
like canine, crown, and wisdom. it's so hard
to translate: i was playing football in the fog,
playing with it, against it, through it, until
i started believing both of us were just goalposts.
it's so hard: desperation measures me at length.
at school i used to exchange scales for erasers
and not be punished. what happened, all of an adult
sudden, to that world? when i read the diagnosis
i feel like that time when, as a primary student,
i went to the secondary section to borrow chalk,
and saw, in the math class, alphabets instead of numbers.
when i reach out you turn me into the stone i used to
measure the distance between the tang of the tamarind
and my afterschool hunger, the stone where the vase-like
tree maps out the confluence of indehiscence, predation,
and decay. sometimes the stone used to hit the school's roof.
now the roof is in need of mending. it's not mourning
our childhoods, our childhoods when we used to mash
hurt till it had no lumps, when we used to babble in trust
and all we had to do to make sense of it was barter its loss.
~ ajay
1/10/2024
