The child regretfully thinks of all the different kinds of sweets and candies she had been eating. She used to lick lollies and liquorices of all sorts. She used to eat big and small sherbet dabs and hard brittle peanuts. But now her conscience feels a terrible prick for having eaten all that harmful stuff.
The child says that every night she would flash the toothpaste to her parents. She would do that to show them that she was going to brush her teeth. And then, very late in the night, she would just move the brush hurriedly up and down her teeth. It did not seem to her worthwhile to brush her teeth thoroughly. She thought that instead of wasting time at brushing her teeth, she should bite at some nice candy.
The child poet says that she would have thrown away all her sherbet (sweets) if she had known she was only paving the way to cavities, caps and decay. She never knew that she would be subjected to fillings, injections and drillings. Had she known this, she would have given up sweets altogether.
Since she ate too much of sweets, she had eventually to lie in the old dentist's chair. While lying there, she would keep looking up miserably at the nose of the dentist. While the dentist's drill went whining into one of the child poet's molars, the dentist would say, 'Amalgam has to be filled in two of them."
The child poet's mother had false teeth. Sometimes she would put them in a glass of water. On seeing bubbles coming up in the water, the child poet would laugh. But now she has realised the bitter fact. She has realised that those false teeth are, in fact, calling her. In other words, the child poet has realised that very soon she, too, will have false teeth because the natural ones would have all decayed and gone. So the child poet regrets that she should have looked after her teeth
