Uncut Poetry

Stealing Beauty

We are privileged enough to linger in beauty without thinking of livelihood.
We spend time with the skies, linger over petunias, chrysanthemums, dahlias and marigolds as they burst in exuberance, watch a frog jump onto a lotus leaf, spend a day in Givenchy, go rapturous over a Zaha Hadid design, go pensive over a Selma poem, linger over a drying leaf in the walking path, bite slowly into the sumptuous juiciness of an Alfonso, spend a day reading a Ludlum, just sit in the winter sun.
 
I am blessed to have a mother who read poetry to me in childhood, and still points out passages which linger. My legacy to my boy, and to those who spend time with me, has always been to point out, read with, talk about the riches strewn all over our universe, things which make life worth living. Going high on a swing, playing cricket in the burnished neighbourhood field, hang on the balustrade of a verandah as we see the summer sun throw a million colours into the lakes beside our house.
 
When we travel, we do so in beauty. Van Goghs we love, local Banksys, rapturous sunrises we travel miles to see, music concerts we see from the fan pit, ruins whose stories we listen with rapt attention, theatre we see, discuss and then discuss again. And the poetry and the books, which are sewn into the fabric of our breath.
 
And the people, our people we love and refuse to take for granted, the people who we don't know but who are all universes in themselves. All who can be portals, gurus, path seekers or companions. These are the ones who make all the difference in our search for what is most precious to the sublime thing called life.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on beauty we find in our worlds - 
Rediscovering Heaven
When We Were One With The Stars
Kintsugi
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
You & Me Forever by Musiclfiles
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/you-&-me-forever
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A Love Letter from a Frustrated Husband to an Exasperated Wife

Darling, make no mistake.
 
There's so much of you I crave and care for. My morning gratitude wishes are of you, whatever nightmare you might have put me through a sweaty night.
 
I've learnt the hard way that married life is less a game of naughts and crosses, and more of remembrances and erasures. Because the burden of memory in a marriage is Krishna's Butterball rock in Mahabalipura, balancing on a point.
 
But, gosh, how much you can cry. Tears are your inbuilt bazookas. And your hysteria is no match to the desperation in my rising voice. And we find reason jettisoned, and notion & conjecture reigning. We become our speculation of each other. We make each other the worst versions of ourselves.
 
You want primacy - to both have the headlights shine on you - and be the headlamp. And I acknowledge it - the moment you see the softness in my eyes and I slip my hand in yours, it's me feeling gushy inside. You have my heart, my fealty, my side, my air, my breath. And then you start off on what's wrong. The fantasy of what's wrong. The perception, the illusion. And I am gobsmacked. What is the genesis of it all? Here we were, happy, sentimental, beautiful together. And then - bam! - the genefluction.
 
What is the genesis of this reverse alchemy? Golden evenings descend into ironic discussions on you not being acknowledged enough; stellar afternoons drift into brassy discussions of how I fall short on your parameters: you clearly remember everything I've done wrong, not the effort I've put in to be the imperfect but hardworking lover.
 
And then I ask - why are we together? What are we doing with each other if we can't be wild roses in our most intimate moments, when I have to hold back afraid of what you'd think, when our conversation is of need and not comfort. When you don't believe me, and I can't ever know why you don't.
 
When all that we are and all that we need, alas, are different things, where, pray tell me, where is our meeting point? Where do we go, my love, where do we go from here?
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the frustrations of love - 
I Should Have Loved More Wisely (they say)
Love's Night of the Long Knives
Distances (Kaifi Azmi ke liye)
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Bells of the Burguoise by Tim Kulig
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/bells-of-the-burguoise
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Let There Be Fewer Stories This Winter

Summer makes me light and present. The monsoon pulls me into its flood of feelings. Autumn turns me inward—part stranger, part seeker.
 
But winter is where I truly awaken. In its drifting mists and sudden shafts of light, old emotions unseal themselves; warmth rises gently from the cold. My mind clears, my questions deepen, and I feel myself walking through unseen passages within.
 
I’m reminded that we are rarely as flawed as we imagine, our circumstances rarely as dire as our stories insist. The world is as complex or as ordinary as we choose to make it. Life’s puzzles soften when we stay still enough to let them simply pass through.
 
Perhaps that is why winter feels philosophical: it offers haze and clarity, cold and warmth, the riddle and its meaning. It asks for no quick truths—yet reveals them when I step back into the open.
 
Winter is what you make of it: always misty, always beautiful, always ready to lift its veils for you
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the the way seasons change - 
Those Days of a Lost Summer
The Passing of Autumn
The Slant of the Winter Sun
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Village Ambience by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/village-ambience
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Going Home

We are such fools, we are, knowing all about inevitabilities, but never (ever) prepared for them. We will lose loved ones, they will die, some in their prime, some before they would have discovered their worth, some even as they burned themselves on both ends.
 
Such is the life of denial we live. Refusing to acknowledge what we know as truth in the deepest fibre of our beings. And when the end does come, as of course it will, we are emotionally, spiritually, illogically, found wanting, found unprepared, found broken.
 
We refuse to acknowledge the known, and the known's blow lands on us like a bludgeon. And we are broken into smithereens.
 
When, if we had faced unto the reality of situations, we would have moulded our time, our priorities in elegant and deep engagements, which would have brought in a final grace in the ones we love to bits.
 
Because often, only too often, we have to let go - of those we love, of those we hold on too tightly to - because in that release, we are also freeing ourselves from the burden of living on, of being the one alive, of the guilt of destiny, of the luck of having some more breaths left.
 
The action of letting go is often the very action which gives us permission to live on.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ways death finds us - 
What Do I Leave Behind?
An Epitaph of Light & Air 
Chemo: As I Battle Myself
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Clean Soul by Kevin Macleod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/clean-soul
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

When We Know Love as Found

Love is as you define it. Often a search. Often a precipice. Often an infraction. Often an acceptance. More often then not, a home we finally settle in, a comfort, a place to step out from the edginess of search to build stories of reconciliations.
 
But life has its outtakes and inputs, twists and twirls, bells and whistles, which do not allow love to rest. Because it does not want one basic thing to be forgotten. That love is an effort. Love is a daily ritual. You fall in love again and again with the same person.
 
Beyond the words, lies the question of why it matters. Because even when undefined or unsaid, love comes in our lives in whisper-soft ways - in thought, in touch, in secret care.
Because the universe adores us. And spreads its munificence everywhere. No one can say she is unloved. She needs to only look out of the window and see an evening sky or feel a summer breeze.
 
Everything beautiful which loves us doesn't always come with announcements.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how whisper-soft is love - 
Lovers in the Morning
Coffee, You & Me
The Importance of Faith in Love
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Parting of the Ways Part 2 by Kevin Macleod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/parting-of-the-ways-part-2
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Valentine Shore

Everyone comes in our lives for a reason. The bad ones, the good ones. It is all revealed in time. Sometimes as a slow-burning mystery, sometimes as a spark in a deep night, sometimes in quiet secret ways even we fail to understand, until we get to look back and retrospect.
 
So many of our relationships tether on the edge, so many drift to seeming nothingness, so many are treacherous like the Annapurna slope, so many solid as resolve.
 
But the true charm of being with someone is the continuous mystery of what emerges, of discoveries and rediscoveries.
 
What sparkles could well burn out, what is secret might not stand the burden of revelation, what seems solid could be merely hollow shell.
 
That's the way bonds go, that's the direction love takes. It revels, it celebrates, it lets time and life determine the direction. Sometimes it leaves us mid-highway, sometimes it helps us navigate through cul de sacs, often it is our companion in long-distance runs, sometimes it goes for a sprint with us, and quickly falls by the wayside.
 
We keep searching for a shore in our relationships, forgetting that we should also be one for those who love us. To be a traveller is beautiful, but to finally rest is also not only a need but a necessity - for ourselves and for those who have covered a distance with us.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the gentleness of love's ways - 
I Love You
I Can Be Your Poem
A City Made of Our Sighs
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Elysium by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/elysium
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A Primer on How to Deal With (Being) Hurt

So much of what we are is the amalgam of hurts we carry deep inside. As past life regression reveals, sometimes the hurt runs deep, bringing forward traces of what's left unresolved from the ages before.
 
However accomplished or complete we might think ourselves to be, we roam the world raw, susceptible to the random snide, reacting to the perceived insult, ultra-sensitive to derision.
 
And we react.
 
And commence an unending cycle of soul terrorism - attack, inflame, die. On the agency of words and bruised egos, we are ready to destroy and be destroyed.
 
We grow cynical, we grow tired. We encounter, and soon become, our worst selves.
 
We encounter the largesse of the universe, walk daily into its wonders, find its gorgeousness laid out for us in the most generous of ways - and walk away, impressed but untouched.
 
But come the snide, the insult, derision, and our very soul finds its lees. We scrape the bottom of what we are. We forget words are seasonal mists. They come and pass. It's often only a local pressure point which creates them, and they dissipate as geographies, seasons or clocks change.
 
The old adage of being still and letting the eddies of life flow over and around us, is soon forgotten. We become the current, the tide, the flood. And destroy beauty - around us, and within.
 
All we had to do was to let hurt come, do its deed and go. And for us to remain serene. Because things pass, feelings pass. If we remain centered, committed to our core, we remain what we are.
 
And paradoxically, the world around us, instead of collapsing, finds its best self, grows, and we grow with it.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hurts and pain we feel ever so often - 
Hope is Merely Fear With a Poor Choice of Lipstick
Heartbreak
On Breaking Up (Without Breaking)
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
You Can't Stay Here by Michael Mojzykiewicz
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/you-can't-stay-here
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

May Your Journey Be Gentle & Safe (as I see a gorgeous eclipse)

It is sobering to realize how insignificant we are in this universe, how much of a speck. And how much the grandeur of nature - a spectacular lunar eclipse, the sun shining on a quiet sea, a moonlit desert - shows us both the incredible world we live in - as also bring us back to the joy of minutiae, if only we have the eyes and time for it.
 
And it brings us back to the gorgeous littleness of our lives. How the highest joys are often reserved for the smallest of things. To have someone in our lives, who knows where the hidden mole in our bodies is. Someone who absorbs the worst of what we are and is ready to let us sink in their arms, irrespective. To sit in serene comfort with each other without a single regret in our hearts. Someone for whose well being we pray with the innermost core of our hearts.
 
Life finds its circle completed in strange mysterious ways. They are no large strokes, there are no Big Bang revelations, it is just the comfort our body and spirit know. A place where we are us and we call it our own.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the journeys we love - or not - 
Departures
Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye
It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Walking Towards the Light by MusicFiles
Majestic Autumn by MusicFiles
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/walking-towards-the-light
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/majestic-autumn
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Moving Tapestry of My Awe

I am so often in awe.
 
Of another being’s endurance or grace — perhaps a lover, a river, the sea, or even time itself.
 
I want to learn how they do it -from borrowing calm, to letting life flow through, to finally resting in stillness and reverence.
 
To see life as a moving tapestry of happenstances, tragedies or ecstasy; living through them, but not allowing any of these to change the essential core of what they are, why they are.
 
They seem to allow both beauty and pain to go through them - such that they are touched and changed, but not rendered cynical or bitter or stormy or intractable.
To be that indestructible rock which is soft to touch; to be that bleeding evening which heals; to be that person who is stubbornly calm and unchanging amidst every provocation we might throw at him.
 
I want to be that person who recognizes the essential fragrance of the unseen flower or is hurt but does not drive into a town like a storm.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the grace we encounter in our lives - 
Her Grace Without Notice
Rediscovering Heaven
Sipping Tea in a Rumi Morning 
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Are All Lovers Pilgrims?

We give up on those we profess to love too soon.
 
There is something primordial, something gossamer, to do with the body, to do with first inchoate impressions, which attracts us to one another in the first place. Because relationships often begin in shallow waters.
 
As things start to become serious, the couple traverses depths. It's not easy. And unexpected. Murky, weed-laden, algae-full. The clear eyes and the pellucid surfaces of early days is suddenly overladen with things about each other we don't even recognize.
It is difficult to swim through the muck. For it seeps into our pores, into the day-&-night of our lives, into our senses, and suddenly everything which was golden turns murky, overladen with offal. What attracted now repulses.
 
This is when things start collapsing. We completely forget what brought us to each other in the first place.
 
In the old days, when coupledom, marriages, were unending, and meant for forever, this was a phase which was meant to be borne, till it passed - and one learnt to live with it.
Often, things remained as they were, however deep the relationship went. Toxicity was the norm. Individually we were supposed to grow, as a couple we were supposed to fly. Instead there was claustrophobia and a sense of doom.
 
But the tragedy often was elsewhere. The tragedy was when we never gave a chance to time and change.
 
Because as one swam through the muck, something magical often started to emerge. Pellucid waters. Depths which captured light like mussels catch pearls. Where the muck was the rough exterior but grace and beauty were permanent residents - albeit hidden.
For the couple, there was a sense of transcendence.
 
And since it was reached with patience, forbearance, commitment, there was a sense of gratefulness and wonder which filled us.
 
So, beyond anything and everything, relationships need the patience of space. Time's hard knocks are a phase to build resilience, to understand the other, and more importantly, for us to uncover layers in ourselves we didn't know existed.
 
Discovery and understanding are both the magnet and the glue which holds a couple together.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the passages of relationships - 
Lovers Who Synchronise (and those who don't)
Return to You
I Said I Love You First
Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'
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 -
Satisfaction by Sascha Ende
Reaching the sky by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Satisfaction
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Reaching-the-sky
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license