Love Impediment Poem by Kaushik Shankar

She was grace and he was a thousand fleeing soldiers at the brink of losing a war,
fumbling like an out of touch F1 driver
like an amateur magician's sleight of hand
that revealed his worst cards
with a missing queen of hearts

Fear and loathing killed him faster
than opium to an unwary boy with pubescent eyes
in the streets of Ludhiana
and if the thoughts in his head were people,
a million earths would fall short to keep them

She needed time and space and he was dimensionless
like a floating debris of poorly executed puns and loose change
She had more mood swings than a pendulum caught in a hurricane
He was desolate like an out-of-work porn star paying child support
as they were chasing an illusion like some kind of Chinese democracy

And as a comma appeared in their poorly written prose,
it didn't take long to turn into a full stop
quicker than a lip syncing pop artist's career
like a fender bender to a 18 car pile up
like sunlight through the crack of a door to a dystopia
with zombies and crackheads and whores

In a different time,
the words would have rhymed
where a six would be a nine
as he wondered with a look of despondence
and a flick of a half lit cigarette
and leaving the world to chance
with a feeling of hope and despair
like a junkie trading his last meal for a needle
that the full stop would turn back into a comma
to a seamless flow of intimacy
where the ocean meets the sea
as if they were two halves of a timeless love story, reunited,
under the shimmering glow of a moonlit sky