#Title

My time on the sidewalk
PHOTO: NAMUBI
KOBI DHOKA
The Sun shines, a relentless yellow,
My watch strikes 8:04am,
The little window to escape wasting away
For eternity or till 10:20am,
All around me, people walk beaded in sweat,
Past the open personhole,
Jumping over the muddy puddle,
Craftily sidestepping the pile of yesterday’s trash,
To eventually find a 200m stretch
Of recently completed sidewalk,
All decked with tactile paving,
The Krishnachura above casts its calming shade,
Even the blind could walk here,
Or so claims the article printed days ago,
But then the paved road merged into the broken,
And sorry I couldn’t travel both,
And be one commuter, long I stood,
And looked down as far as I could,
To where it wasn’t as broken.
This is a poem, apparently, that one of our former writers responded with when asked to write something on the city streets. The writer has been so terribly burnt out that she never really recovered, but we used the poem to put out a call for poems from our readers.
We need it, because all our staff writers are either down with some form of flu or a bad case of ulcers because there is so much material out there, but somehow we cannot seem to write about them, not because there is any bar obviously, but we are just miserably unmotivated and didn’t sign up for those motivation classes.