Uncut Poetry

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 
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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

Replay - Letting Go (a childhood song)

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it,
Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands.
Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt as big as childhood’s sandpit, even as we tell ourselves that leaving is the best thing to do, we feel bereft. What is it about childhood that we carry it inside us wherever we go, however far we might go? We carry it often as benediction, often as an abomination. If we are lucky, it’s the sunshine of those years which light up our later years, if all our growing is done in shadows, what we have inside is a throbbing hurting night. 
What do we make of ourselves because of those years when we were open and ready to receive and vulnerable? What is it that we take forward and what is that that we desperately want to leave behind? What is it that we wish was different, what is that we feel should be changed but now can’t? Is there an unwarranted guilt? Is there an anger, a sense of being cheated, a feeling that someone didn’t do their given duty, of giving something as elemental as caresses of breeze and drops of sun? 
Because only too often, we live only in the continent of regret, bereft of the balming buffets of past winds,  and stigmatise our entire lives to the memory of what can never be changed. Only when we quietly let go of what we have accumulated throughout our lives and find possibilities to remake ourselves in some form of a sunshine, can we come out as full individuals, tempered, touched but not scalded. 
We would finally find a new home.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the love, longing and loss of childhood   -
When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
My Little Zen Warrior
Kripa (a blessing from a daughter)
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 following music was used for this media project:Music: Heaven's Gate by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gate License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license 
 

Finding Home in Places We've Left Behind

Revisiting a place where one has one's roots is tricky business.
 
On the one hand, there is enough familiarity - relatives, school chums as unrecognisable adults, hazy lines of playgrounds, peacocks, changing views from rooftops, familiar cracks now deeper - and on the other, one enters the familiar as a complete stranger. The air is lighter, the light is sharper, the language is alien in spite of familiar intonations, and one sits on judgement. And a sense of superiority emerges - as if the place I've settled in is not only different, but also way 'ahead', whatever the meaning of that word is.
 
But the bigger tragedy is how we look at what was hometown, nay home, is now a place to judge, to compare, to find it falling short.
 
We move on in life - whether it indicates moving forward is a moot point. What does linger is what we leave behind. Sometimes as a place stuck in a time-wrap, sometimes merely reluctant to find new beats, happy in its anachronisms. Sometimes as people, who are happy to remain what they are, tiny dreams ensconced in comfortable immobility. And that is a choice to be happy in one's own quiddities, within one's particularities.
 
And who are we to judge, just because we have found different dreams, racier trajectories, more informed choices. If finally what we as human beings seek is serenity and fulfilment, how do we even know whether that is there in the places and people we have left behind?
 
In our desire to know ourselves better, it is often a good idea to haul ourselves back to our roots, and then just sit back and see ourselves implode, explode, sink or float. If nothing else, we will get to know ourselves better.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ways we find and lose homes - 
Finding Home in Broken Places
Finally Home
A Home as an Open Dream
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 -
Rising Sun by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Rising-Sun
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

When it Rains, Love Slips

Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances.
 
Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is presumption. Of course we know when we are in love and when we are pretending: when we carry wounds like a fireball hidden inside. So much of love is the warmth of a glance as also the heartbreak of a look avoided.
 
The shadow of love is often fraught with short-term memory. We remember the last outtake, the last remark, the last deed. The fractured nature of our feelings, invariably, leads us astray into judging love as a finality, defined as that last piece of interaction, forgetting the warmth, the light and the wonder of what it meant for so long.
 
Of course, we drift, of course we are flooded, of course we are castaways in our own opinions, of course we are prisoners of minutiae, even as the big picture looms large beckoning us into its now-fading glory.
 
Our obsession with the now and the just-elapsed, makes us error-prone, subsuming us in its shallow currents. We lose the perennial for the ephemeral.
 
And even as we sit at the shore, we drown in innocuous backdrafts.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the way we romance rains and storms - 
Dancing in the Rains
Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms & Lovers in Spate
Waiting for a Storm
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 -
Artemis by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Artemis
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Lovers Who Synchronise (& those who don't)

Pondering as I do on relationships, the beauty and brokenness of them, I continuously marvel, nay wonder, at both their tenacity and tenuousness. And how, at the bottom of them all, they all exist on the basis of a single decision: to be together.
 
However old, however strong, whatever the optics, the couple is together only because they want to be. Years might slip by, a thousand experiences might be shared treasure, but a single call, a sentence, a simple "I want to leave you", and a bond collapses.
 
And it doesn't require a calamity, another love, incompatibility or differences, for that decision to be made, enunciated and executed. We, as humans, are victims to so many things - possessiveness, insecurities, jealousies, emptiness. And then history doesn't matter.
 
And a separation just happens.
 
The question always is - what right do we have in or to each others lives? What is the value of a paper signed as ritual, or a promise made to love each other forever.
 
And that's why I'm in awe of people who not only stick together for years, but do it with equanimity and a quiet happiness. I see couples who gel with each other with such felicity that when they are together, when they speak, when they share silences, they do it as one. It's almost as if there's no distance in their souls. That, without meaning, somehow, some place, they simply got split, though they were one body, one spirit, one soul.
 
Their presence is a generosity, and an answer to my own cynicism about the future of long-term coupledom.
 
If only we go beyond the surface gnarls, flaws, habits and blemishes, so much is possible. Such serenity is garnered, if only we realize the minimising effect of expectation, and see each other as flawed creatures of infinite possibilities.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ebbs & flows of love - 
A City Made of Our Sighs
Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye
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 -
The Day After Tomorrow by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/the-day-after-tomorrow
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Just Be Air

We don't always realize, how much of our lives belongs to others, is determined by others. Their concerns, their insistences, their jealousies, their phobias, their happinesses, their frustrations. Their blank stares, their under-the-breath comments, their lack-of-joy. Their obsessions, their obsessive need to control. Their potential reactions, their prejudices, their silences.
 
In time, what we do, indeed, what we become, is a factor of what someone else might want us to be. Covering the entirety of our realities is the miasma of overwrought anticipation.
 
What would she say?
What would she think?
How would she react?
Would she agree?
 
Decisions then genuflect to a person and not to the situation.
And this subsummation is complete when, in time, we forget what we want. In the extreme case, we look to the person for everything we want to say, want to do, and even asking "is this what I want?"
 
This genuflection is ultra-common with Personality Type A people who naturally assume that the world revolves around them - else it would collapse under its own incompetencies. The cost is severe. Allegiance generated is tenuous. And even if such a person is ultra-intelligent, she will find herself to be her greatest enemy.
 
 Thus unhappiness is not always generated, it is excavated, gathered. As if we go into a meadow to obsessively pluck thorns instead of flowers for a bouquet.
 
Relationships invariably require a light touch. The bonds, paradoxically, become stronger when they are tied in gossamer. The responsibility to a relationship comes not from insistencies of history or law or sacrifice. It is far subtler. The strongest ties come from discovery, curiosity, space, respect. 
 
Relationships are never simple. And we do not always help in making them simpler for ourselves.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the gossamer nature of relationships - 
Quietly Yours
Lovers as Witnesses
I Fell in Love With You (Again) Beside the Tin of Sardines
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 -
Evacuation by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Evacuation
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Waiting

People drift.
 
Love leaves home. Life becomes a refugee. We become migrants in our own cities.
What brought two people together often becomes the reason which tears them apart.
Poetry is often a glue, often it it only a record-keeper. Often it is a bystander, checking out its own pulse.
 
And the two who loved how poetry defined them, find the suburbs of love - where they finally have to settle - to be boring brick-laden homestays.
 
So much of love - as of life - are the boring intermezzos. When definitions of everything get recreated inside endless vistas of nothingness.
 
What survives is cacti, or becomes prickly like it. Our best selves dry out. And we become our worst versions.
 
We are very rarely sensitive enough to know how we have regressed, how we have devolved. We see our sunburnt smiling faces in the mirror, and then go cursing into the arena of life, desperate for distraction, despairing to know where we'd gone wrong.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on relationships which are adrift - 
Finding Myself Beyond You
Living Inside a Wound
Perpetrators & Victims of 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 -
Sayan 21112020 by Sayan Mukherji
 

So Tonight That I Might See You

Relationships often run their course. But we don't. And I'm both heartbroken and frustrated at the phenomenon. As I try to decipher the possibility of a rich life, now existing as an afterlife.
 
It's not a question of toxicity setting in, but of a river in full spate disappearing into an arid empty bed.
 
And I ask - why do we hold onto relationships which subtract us as human beings?
Because what doesn't lift us, diminishes us; what doesn't inspire us, enslaves us; what doesn't make us see the best of what we are, curdles us.
 
But.
 
We hold onto these because we are prisoners of affection, of a history which often consists of laying bare our soul, of being conjoined at the hip in adventures which defined us, of seeing the world through each other's eyes.
 
And then we see this world of two collapse. There could be too many reasons for any one even deserving a stating. Human nature - both in its proactive compulsions and reactive idiocy -  is the same in its self-destructive propulsion.
 
We lose our direction because someone is unfaithful; we lose our head because someone has decided to determine our future; we disengage because someone doesn't think our advice deserves attention.
 
Now, facing the world with dread because of an acidic relationship, makes us smaller versions of ourselves, making us give little of what we are capable of. Because we are affected by what is infinitesimal in infinity's scheme of things.
 
And we go into a state of statis. In purgatory, araf, bhuvar-lok. Forever in limbo.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems of when love is forever grey - 
Finding Myself Beyond You
Here We Are in the Years
Living Inside a Wound
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 -
The Children of MH17 by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/the-children-of-mh17
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Morning After

What did my palms come to know
what did my skin feel
what did my eyes own
as I transversed universes
as I clasped light    conscious
we are captive of time and age
held together in ways undefinable
on the wings of unsaid hope,    possibilities
held as a moment's gift
   who are we if not fools   holding
love as a talisman
a bushel of kisses as proof
that when all fails
there's a touch which knew
   as we other our other worlds
as we hold love-bites
as we withhold wounds
as we travel our bodies
knowing there is life    knocking
incessantly on the door
and there is time    time
only for one last kiss
one last look
 
 
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on ways of lovemaking - 
Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms and Lovers in Spate
Her Breasts as Shelter
Your Body is a Truth
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 -
True Summer Love by musiclfiles
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/true-summer-love
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license