Three poems by Saad Ahmed Shaikh

Words come through like tetris blocks trying to stack clean, none of them bespoke to my speech.

St-utter

Words come through

like tetris blocks

trying to stack clean,

none of them

bespoke to my speech.

I steer to clear

with trackpad tongue

and keyboard teeth,

syllables shiverishly fevering.

A block now

unseemly

advances.

Too late, I speakstack it oddly.

Too late,

another piles up on top,

You know how it goes, I try to shrug

and shiver involuntarily.

What follows is mayhem,

stackstackstack hitting the roof

of my cluttered mouth,

voice sticking to gum and enamel,

tearing off both with crackling staccato,

radio static filling every cavity.

Till one breaks through

and flattens the palate;

air rushes in;

I breathe out deformed phrases;

the words tumble out in a

hurryflurry.

Sorry? their eyes say,

the word a question and a pity.

I hit replay.

Drain, after Shel Silverstein

I cleaned my drain yesterday.

Cleaned it of hair and soap and blood

And snot from a recent flu.

Cleaned it inside and out,

And scrubbed the stopper through.

I dropped a drain cleaner for good measure,

Let it bubble its way to the deep,

And slept so soundly last night,

I heard it sizzle in my sleep.

I dreamt of flowing water, of whirlpools in my sink,

And all I drop disappears before I can even blink.

Now awake, I approach the drain,

Groggy gait and bleary-eyed.

The shiny sink winks at me,

I smile a smile teary-eyed.

The tap opens, the water gushes,

A droplet hits my tear,

The surface sparkles (sploosh and splash!)

I wait for it to clear.

But oh! the horror! Horror! Horror!

Oh the terrible calamity!

No gurgling whirlpool water,

No cleansing fluidity.

Rising writhing to the surface instead,

Up come Hair, Snot, and Blood again.

And through it all, I see it now,

I see my brain stuck in the drain.

A Class Act

Good morning, class.

G oo d mor n ing, sir.

Shufflerufflestretchandyawn.

I yawn in response,

it's a sad morning, and we're all here.

Where were we?

Glazed eyes dreaming say nothing,

shuffleruffle the pages turn.

A'right, let us revise and look back

on what we've studied so far,

close your books and let's see if you remember.

A question and then another.

A shuffle

and then another.

A question again, disquieted and disquieting.

You said look back, the eyes say,

didn't you?

So I look back over the months,

it's the same day as the first,

every day has been today.

I sit down

and together we gaze into emptiness.

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Saad Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of English, a PhD scholar, and the co-founder of Baithak and Beyond, a Pune-based poetry community active since 2017.