There is something inherently dark coating the edges of love, I think. A love poem written on a half burnt paper, trying to cover up the traces of ash and soot with fragrant doses of blinding romanticism. When I thought of Shadow, I immediately thought of love—which just tells how blurred the lines between love and obsession we often think to be, and how we can never really tell the difference.
It was also meant to be slightly horror, I think, which also just goes to tell more about lines and lack thereof, but we’re not going to talk about that. I don’t think I quite managed to decide whether this poem is actually a love story or the trailer of a horror movie, but life is multifaceted that way.
Your shadow never sleeps.
It hasn’t got the time.
When you wake up, the morning light peeking through the curtains,
it watches as you lazily pick up the day.
It watches as you drink yesterday’s tiredness away—
which somehow the night couldn’t swallow—with a cup of steaming hot coffee.
It watches as you don’t even wince when it burns.
Your shadow likes that
the way you stuff things in a faded old bag
just minutes before leaving the house,
how you always check the pockets for a pen right after you close the door,
and then walk back in when you don’t find one,
the nervous smiles, and the carefree laughs,
the frown between your brows as you work,
and how it vanishes when you scroll down your phone every two hours.
Your shadow works with you, and when you’re tired, it leans back to relax with you.
Your shadow, in a word, is obsessed.
Sometimes, you sit in the burning sun alone,
or in the dying sun with friends or in the shining moonlight
with nothing but memories and music.
Sometimes your shadow sits right by your side, in silent company
and you don’t realise that it’s there until it’s dark.
Then you look at the watch on your wrist,
and up at the sky where once a moon was shining.
You look at the darkness around you, and decide that it’s time to leave. But—
Your shadow never leaves.
Atleast, not until the night, when you don’t need it anymore.
Your shadow stays all day, until it doesn’t—until it’s night.
Then your shadow lives a life that is not yours.
It skips out of the rope that ties it to you,
and bounces out into the endless darkness, looking for home.
Your shadow is no more yours. It is another wisp in the dark,
playing with the lights peeping out of door holes in strange houses,
and waiting—for the lights to turn off,
for another shadow inside to come out too, for a little more time,
a little more darkness, until the sun is there again.
Your shadow never believes,
when it sees you floating down the room one day—
A body with your face lying somewhere in a dream.
It never wakes up.
You’re dead, you’re alone, but—
Your shadow never sleeps, and now you won’t either.
When I thought of this poem, I thought of shadows, and how they never actually leave us, atleast not during the day, like someone who once was loved but then forgotten. An image of a past love clinging in hopes of revival, or recognition. Maybe we all become shadows someday, a ghost of longing and love, chasing whatever form of solid reality that we can and sticking close.
Maybe there is an extant form of everything, like fungus stuck to the surface of rocks and earth. Maybe love is nothing but this remembering. Hoping to remind. Something, someone, that was never really forgotten.
There are metaphors everywhere, waiting to be picked up and picked apart. Maybe your shadow is just another metaphor, awaiting analysis.
If you want more metaphors, more poems, try reading A Poem About Summer And Falling In Love
