do you remember the day you outgrew those black buckle shoes?

your toes were sardined inside them but you knew better

than to complain about the serious lack of wiggle room.

that grey pinafore stiffened into a sheet of lead.

its straps hung heavy on your back and bent it out of shape.

life was so dull in greyscale.

your unoiled braids began to maneuver themselves

out of the serpentine red coil of ribbon and untangle.

(in retrospect, your back was not the only thing that got bent out of shape.)

what about that garrotte of a tie?

how promptly it tightened around your throat whenever it sensed

an inflammatory mob of asterisks, hashtags and exclamation points

charging towards the exit!

(you swallowed a lethal amount of those.)

it's a good thing you can regurgitate them now

like the formulas and the facts you regurgitated

on those answer scripts that were expected to be--

what was that word they used?--

uniform.