Bring a light when you come, for it's dark on the highway
And trucks roaring along grimly, in the dark, with lit-up jaunty cabins
Will jauntily run us over and be gone.
Mid-morning will find us vanished into tubes and chalk outlines
With the tar just beginning to bubble and absorb the last of us,
Moustaches shaking knowingly at those
Crazy youngsters on bikes, trying to get free,
Or whatever,
Causing heartache to parents and wasting their money,
Though we're not them.

In full rooms, with full lives, we're happy just trying,
But they'd mark us out as anti-socials,
Delinquents, Sallu-aspirants or shameless (-ful?) women
With troubled childhoods, oppressed by the drought of civilization,
The pressures of the information age, the ruthless competition.
Like elephants dead in the electric fences of sanctuary
We were caught getting in or out—
A State infrastructural lapse.
We might've even got bullet-holes, and become
Would-be terrorists, or Maoists; "How a child from such a good family—?"
And so on. I suppose we should've expected it.
Here we were, trying not to take
The path less travelled by; what would make a difference?