Episodes
5 days ago
Coming to Your Side of The Bed
5 days ago
5 days ago
So much of what we are is because of abandonment. Often as reality, often as feeling. We talk but we don’t get through. Our silences are many, none find a resolution. Our words come out with warm intent, but when conjoined sound harsh. We love to death the very person we find the most fault with.
But in this morass of disintegrating hope, we are firm on continuums. We are not ready to give up. Because we know things change, people change. And no season is permanent.
And such do relationships survive.
And often, very often, they find their equilibrium. Not so much as a reconciliation, which is often there, but as an understanding. Beyond the spontaneity of an outburst, or the harshness of a habitual word, one recognises the heart, well hidden though it might be. And then everything is forgiven.
But there are times when such understandings do not emerge. And that’s when two good people are found to be excavating the worst of themselves: in relationships people discover the depths of depravity or dismay or disillusionment that they can reach.
Alas, that is what then defines us as people - everything else is forgotten.
Even if we move to the other side of the bed, we find it empty.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the complex rhythms of relationships -
Tracing Shadows on Your Back
Letting Go (because I'm alive)
Of love (& other bouts of sadness)
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Good men do bad things by Phat Sounds
Shadows of Autumn full version by Musiclfiles
Saturday Mar 16, 2024
Replay - In the Drift We Will Find Our Certainties
Saturday Mar 16, 2024
Saturday Mar 16, 2024
This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.
"We walk under boughs heavy with fragrance,
petals touching our cheeks with infinitesimal tenderness,
and think back to how meaningless was what we’d said.
In a universe of a million possibilities, we could be a certainty,
but we suffered our uncertain inequities.
We should have found tenderness like kittens venturing into the world -
with fright and wonder
and the ability to believe.
Alas, we stopped at our conceptions
of each other."
They say “The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.” In that one coruscating truth lies the crux of relationships. The question then is not of doubts or misgivings or dwindling love, but it is - have you given yourselves enough time? In that one question lies an irrevocable truth - things take no time to unravel but take time to settle.
You have to keep examining, you have to keep asking. Why don't you care? Why did you hurt me? Why did this happen? Why do you believe this about me? Why did you do this? The answers would be unsatisfactory, they will be evasive, but though they might not bring clarity to you, they will make the other think. And they will understand why you hurt, where you hurt. The shrapnel will be blunted.
At the same time, you are embracing your own strengths, the preciousness that you bring, the value of what you are, and it nullifies when others attempt to make you think less of yourself .
You will not like everything, but you will understand a few things. You will be able to cut through the fluff of your own misconceptions, and theirs, to understand the truth of what makes relationships work.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on complexities of relationships -
Why Don't You Make Love to Me Anymore?
That Gorgeous Evening When You Left
He Made Lasagna Before He Left
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Heart Love by MusicLFilesLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Asperger by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/9264-aspergerLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Saturday Mar 09, 2024
Tracing Shadows On Your Back
Saturday Mar 09, 2024
Saturday Mar 09, 2024
It’s one of the ironies of life that relationships which have persisted for years, often have hesitation built into their fibre. You know everything of each other, but are still not sure of your place in their lives. The important thing which keeps haunting you is - what do both of you mean to each other.
You say the things which you have been saying for years, she reacts the way she has been reacting for years, and both of you dislike the way you have conducted the conversation. But you have not been able to reconcile with the hurt which you somehow convey in that interaction. You are completely off sync. You feel you are being normal, she feels she is being normal, but you are totally off kilter.
And you’re not able to reconcile what is wrong in the way you are with each other.
I have often wondered how misconceptions persist over the years. It’s not for want of trying. You attempt trying to make each other understand your love languages, and to show where things hurt, and how what’s normal for him is hurt for her, or how a simple word or gesture can be so irritating, devastating or problematic. But what you get in return is another layer of misunderstanding.
You of course love each other. There’s too much you’ve been through - joys, pain, babies, walks, coffee breaks, loved meals, cookouts, relatives you don’t like, friends you love, movies you’ve seen holding hands, music you’ve both loved with tears in your eyes, the dresses you’ve admired each other in, the dusks you’ve spent doing nothing but holding each other. All the little things which have made you persist. But even then the questions persist.
And such do simple lives find their own ways to fragile devastation.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the simple complexities of love -
Letting Go (because I am alive)
Of Love (& other bouts of sadness)
What I Miss is the Tender Moment
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Natural Paradise by Musiclfiles
Saturday Mar 02, 2024
And The Crowds Roared, As The Music Rose
Saturday Mar 02, 2024
Saturday Mar 02, 2024
As I gear up for the Ed Sheeran show, I’ve been trying to fathom the excitement in me! I’ve seen some terrific shows - Kylie Minogue, Kate Perry, Michael Jackson (omg - goosebumps!), Norah Jones, Michael Learns to Rock, and the innumerable gigs of favourite Indian singers and jazz bands - and somehow when I see tour rosters of my favourite artistes, I keep wondering if i can match my travelling plans to catch them perform.
And there are so many. The ones I would love to catch - Billie Elish, Sia, Mansa Jimmy, Elisapie, Hania Rani, Birdy, Jon Batiste, Ali Sethi - just to name a few! And the ones I will regrettably never be able to hear - Leonard Cohen, The Doors, Ghulam Ali, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkle. Somehow when I draw a circle, to denote the completeness of my life, these invariably feature as a factor.
It’s easy to say that we are merely listeners, as we sit in a hall, a stadium, under darkened ceilings or lie flat with starlight above. But when a listener gets drenched in the music she loves, there is both a transcendence and an immersion, which is as much a part of music being for the listener’s soul, as it is the musician’s in creating sublimity.
I have stood with 50000 fans and sang along songs which each one of us knew by heart, and felt transported. Felt communion, felt lifted, knew the meaning of soaring.
Apart from the concerts, with their presence of community and crowd, for me music is an intimate accompaniment to life rhythms. I have music playing almost through my waking hours. Soft, often indescribable, often random. But for me, it is a way to be more productive, to bold-italic-underline the moment. It makes life more important, richer. Whilst it is often considered mere distraction, it never is. It is forever giving. It enriches, even as it is played in the background.
I have often puzzled how the most puerile of lyrics (“love, love me do, I love you too” - for Christ’s sake!) become ear-worm and stay with us throughout our lives. Such is the power of music notes, the words and their inimitable interlinking. But in that remembrance they often transport us to some place of essential innocence, a place of swaying trees, a breezy arbour of sundrops and shade.
If music is first sound, then our first intimation of love - our Mum’s gentle cooing - has to be the first music note which gives us the confidence to believe the rest of the world. And possibly therein lies the kernel of music’s mysterious warmth and comfort, the reason why we often forget the notes but remember the feeling.
We are home with the music we love.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the advent of esctasy -
Flutter
Gather Me
Ceremony of Longing
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Die Unendliche Geschichte by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/512-die-unendliche-geschichteLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Saturday Feb 24, 2024
Mr Hoskote, have you visited Kashmir recently?
Saturday Feb 24, 2024
Saturday Feb 24, 2024
Ranjit Hoskote, the famous art critic, poet ,writer wrote an amazing piece on Gaza and the humanitarian tragedy unfolding there. It was a piece which broke my heart, truly, as it brought out in sharp relief the incredible carnage taking place with impunity and for days on end.
But then he interlinked Gaza with Kashmir.
And that was something which he did casually, as if he was duty-bound to do so, as a fact. And I was grieved that someone so sensitive and aware, could also be so frivolous, so tone-deaf. And suddenly I realised how much his words were artifice, played to a gallery, which would anyway cheer him along.
It disturbs me that poets, writers, thinkers find it expedient to bring in Kashmir in all narratives of torture, pain, without delving deeper into the principal issues, without historical perspective, without even trying to find what the present reality is, the truth of the ongoing narrative. This casual interlinking, using Kashmir as common coinage is something which truly disturbs me. Hence this poem.
Read the incredibly sensitive essay here -
https://scroll.in/article/1063846/ranjit-hoskote-in-our-interconnected-world-gaza-is-everywhere
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the meaning and price of freedom -
For Anyone Who Bleeds
Blood & Light in the War Zone
Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Medieval Love by Frank Schroeter
Saturday Feb 17, 2024
Maybe, a Little Kindness
Saturday Feb 17, 2024
Saturday Feb 17, 2024
I have often been cruel. Knowingly, unconsciously. With people closest to me, and invariably because I take them for granted. So it is a mini tragedy, when I sit down and have a conversation - and I’m short, I’m angry, I’m sarcastic.
Take my mum - she is frail now, though her voice still has passion, but is veering towards gentle tones now. And I can ‘win’ any battle by the sheer dint of volume. Pyrrhic victory, if there ever was one, as she goes silent, and I keep reading the newspaper as if nothing has happened.
We are both in a space of a confined relationship, whose contours could never be changed. I would be her son forever - and we were tied to each other inextricably, as fact, as benediction or affliction. Our relationship is one of perfect imperfection. We come with legacy in our blood and history in our senses, as we fill each other’s space on a daily - often hourly - basis. And within that proximity lies the very seed of slowly getting blinded to the good we do to each other. We start taking each other for granted.
And I mull on Oscar Wilde’s symbolical lines - “Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard…” The realisation is a sickening thud. Because to hurt a loved one is to do the irreconcilable. Circumstances might determine a future of forced togetherness , but the heart remembers what it remembers.
And scars take longer than forgiveness to lose their mark.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the preciousness of gentleness and kindness -
An Epitaph MAde of Light & Air
How To Hold Love as it Breaks
Kintsugi
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Motivational Soft Piano Meets Cello by Horst Hoffman
Saturday Feb 10, 2024
Replay - A Home as an Open Dream
Saturday Feb 10, 2024
Saturday Feb 10, 2024
This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.
"We would talk of the day to make
the outside world our own,
and lay joint claim
to our individual memories."
A home is of so many definitions. The place we grow in, the place we get our first intimations of the living world, the place we are desperate to get to at the end of a day - but also the place we are desperate to leave as we grow.
Often a shelter, often a prison, often just a roof, often the very symbol of unquestioning acceptance. We learn the meaning of bruises from those in the next room, and the ill-imitable depth of love from those further down the hall. We learn there is often no difference between the command of an elder and the confines of an ego. We learn of chains of command and of the subtle exertion of real power.
We learn how some of the hardest decisions come from the softest heart, and male prerogative is often just a cover for cluelessness. We leave home for pilgrimages, when actually we are in search of a home.
Home is deep nights and late escapes. Home is often of going away without looking back. And to die in peace often only means to have found that address which we can finally call home - and to have that address find us.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which take you back home (and its strange dynamics!) -
It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away
Extraordinary Life
A Morning Ramble on How Love is Rediscovered at the Bottom of Rubble
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Romantic Piano by Rafael KruxLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/5471-romantic-piano-License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Saturday Feb 03, 2024
I Like The Ordinary Life
Saturday Feb 03, 2024
Saturday Feb 03, 2024
This awareness, this stopping to see something insignificant, the overwhelming desire not to look at my mobile for long moments - I sometimes think it’s aging which is doing this to me. The fact that I have seen a bit of life, of tragedy and joy, of the big events of life and some, and no longer wish for the large and the loud.
Now what stops me are things which seem to happen in passing. A snatch of music, the stitching of a happy conversation, a stray comment followed with a comfortable silence, the sound of laughter drifting out from a street-level window. Suddenly these seem important. Often, when my dad and I stand in his room’s verandah, and watch a decaying sunset, the rays reflecting in the three lakes in front of us, his arm around my shoulder, my chest swells such that it seems it will burst open.
I just know these are the things I will think of on my deathbed, and these are the things which will help me drift away serenely. So I am going about collecting these moments hungrily, as if there is no tomorrow.
Somewhere in our desire to see life only as movement from one high to another or as a remembrance only of the photographable, we lose sight of the infinitesimal, the mote in the sun-ray, the buzz of a wasp going busily about its business.
I’m just glad I’ve fallen in love with my common uninteresting unadventurous life.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the preciousness of the passing moment -
Mornings (as entry points to life)
Letting Go (A Childhood Song)
Tenderness in the Pause
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Nothing but memories by Reegsb
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
A Sense of Her Tenderness
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
I doubt if there’s anybody who tends to words with such infinite tenderness. For her, they are rounded pebbles on a seashore, sea waves washing over naked feet, the gentle curve of the sea at the horizon.
She holds words the way I hold her.
But strangely when I think of her, it is always with a silent smile, like a truth which leaves us speechless, the way the sun slips out as a guest does when tired of a party.
I sometimes feel there’s too little of her in this world, someone who feels the world as a good place and sees it with forgiveness. I ask her what her greatest fear is and she says “Losing you.” I tease her and ask “Not losing yourself?” She looks at me and says “You’re there to find me. That’s why I can’t lose you.”
Then she adds “But I know something. In this life of unfinished hope, I also wish us dirt, passion, devotion. I want to burrow so deep into the entrails of life that I almost drown in its depths - and just because it can’t stand me anymore it spits me right out.”
I listen to her silently. And know the reason I love her is because she helps me see the wonder in everything which I fear. And in her boldness and her gentle desire lie her insistences. As if Hania Rani had given breath to her song ‘Esja’, and her notes wanted to break out and dance on the thinnest ice possible or at a precipice which could crumble and break.
And as we sit in the winter sun, our fingers intertwined, I realise how much she wanted to dance, with her words, with her life, with her being, with me. If life could be a music track, she would start with a hymn, let rap take over and then go out in a blaze of the most improvised jazz adventure possible!
And as I hold onto to her gentleness, I know her to be steel.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the serenity which comes with love -
Why We Should be Happy with Berry Jam of Table Edges
Come When The Heat of Noon Has Still Not Dimmed
I Fell In Love With You (Again) Beside the Tin of Sardines
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Traveling OVer The Clouds by Musiclfiles
Saturday Jan 20, 2024
The Woman You See
Saturday Jan 20, 2024
Saturday Jan 20, 2024
We as persons are so much of the people who inhabit our lives. Not only by way of how they are connected to us and change the trajectory of our lives, but what they mean to us by way of how our souls evolve. But beyond it all is their influence on our minds and hearts to define to us what we are.
Sometimes we are unsure of our own abilities to achieve, to fulfil, to create. And though we might be brimming with every talent, we might be an uncertain wreck inside, unable to comprehend the intensity of our own possibilities.
And then someone in our life comes by and refuses to accept our limitations.
They keep seeing beyond, they keep seeking more, they keep insisting that we are much more, that we are needlessly imprisoning ourselves in a low opinion of ourselves, and we can be beyond everything we can comprehend.
I remember a Japanese story where a girl considered plain by the whole world and jeered at whenever she came out of her house, is wooed by the most eligible man in the village, and he proposes with a record number of buffaloes, which nobody in the village could even comprehend. And soon enough the girl grows into becoming the beauty which her beau saw inside her.
Of course the story is allegorical, but it’s truth is not.
We grow into our best selves when someone refuses to believe that we are anything less.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on love & trust -
The Importance of Faith in Love
I Can Be Your Poem
Her Grace without Notice
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Crescendiocity by Alexander Nakarada
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