Disturbance Poem by Sibghatullah Khan

Both of us were working,
Dead serious- -I was reading
And he was out to find something to eat.
As my dark brown golden-hands clock ticked away,
my Dell laptop, Inspiron 15, Touch Display,
hissed only in a corporate way
to reassure silence.


Desperate in the kitchen, he moved
from cabinet to cabinet, can to can
with his tell-tale noise, sniffing the place like mad.
He ran through dishes and spoons in the sink,
sniffed our turned-over bread-pan posthaste,
circled around a bin containing vegetable waste,
and drew a circle with his tail laying astern.


And, when I thought his presence in the kitchen
was so disquieting, I perhaps forgot
that I was no less a spoiler of the game:
It was because whenever I stood up and saw
what it was that was in there, he would go dead
and stop working. I thought it was always man
who disturbed things in this world, not them.