[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?