Modern Love Poems: To the lover I will never get to know by Shrutee Choudhary

[Note from Frolic: We’re so excited to welcome poet Shrutee Choudhary back to the site. She’s sharing more of her breathtaking modern love poems with us!]

1. To the lover I will never get to know

I’m sorry, we never got our story. It is unsettling to me though, that just because our paths don’t cross in this lifetime, you don’t get to be a poem. 

I like to think of you when I have nobody else to think of, I fixate my eyes on the sky and imagine it reaching you, maybe even touching you with it’s gentle sunshine or aggressive rain. I like to think you like when it rains. 

You reside in my mind not as an idea, but as a real person, with flesh and bones and a voice with a deep, husky tone. You’re simply not in this reality but you exist inexplicably so

in attempted poetry, in an incomplete story

somewhere just over the horizon, in between time. 

Maybe you and I are like parallel lines, not meant to meet one another

and yet, one can’t exist without the other.

2. he said

“i hope you are hanging

in there

not like forgotten clothes

in a wardrobe.

rather, like the preserved paintings 

that adorn walls of a museum 

in proud, carved frames.”

and suddenly 

there was a smile

on my face, an ever so flickering one

like an old tubelight

like I had forgotten the act of smiling

completely.

that sums up the effect he had on me

he shone light 

everywhere the darkness was

he dared open the curtains 

to my soul.

3. Could home be a cage a love bird sings in

Could it be a sanctuary a tiger slumbers in

Could it be your arms my anxieties die in

Could it be you entirely, darling? 

Because I sit in my house 

but the house doesn’t sit right with me

a stranger in a strange space 

with no comfort, and with no grace

Counting down the days until uncertainty 

leaves room for clarity

Could it be only a few days of drifting

or a lifetime of bereavement 

Could it be that we could once again 

find a safe haven and fulfilment? 

Could it be true, darling?