Uncut Poetry

It Takes Time for Love to Find Comfort

Relationships take time. Even 'love at first sight' is a construct only, finding immediate challenge in the crucible of real life. I know couples who have gone around for years, but find they scarcely know each other within the first week of married life.
 
The interesting dynamic is the setup provided by love. It could work in two dynamically different directions. It could make you accept what really comes your way with generosity and a desire to work through the unexpected discoveries in a person. The other extreme would be the crashing of expectations, and understating that what-you-thought-&-what-you-got were such such incredibly different things - to be jettisoned immediately.
 
Such does life give - and we choose to give away.
 
We need to understand that ties are always brittle to begin with. There's trust to be built, there's vulnerability to be shown, there are defeats to be accepted along with victories which need to be celebrated. In our attempt to be what we've shown ourselves to be, we should not forget that impressions cut both ways - and truths are often more charming than cultivated lies. We WANT our partners to be mere mortals living and breathing heartbreak, distress, irrationality, madness, quirkiness, and everything else which makes us human.
 
If within those realities, we are not accepted, maybe there is something else in store, someone else to grow with out there, who would enrich our lives in immeasurable ways.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how loves gives comfort - 
I Think I Can be an Adventure WIth You
When We Know Love As Found
Just be Air
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 -
Epic Intro 2017 by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/epic-intro-2017
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Where We Start & Where We End

The charm and beguile of life is that it throws the unexpected with such unerring regularity.
 
We start something with an intent. But the universe has other ideas. We strive for bliss in flight and fall in love with the grizzly earth.  So much of what enriches our lives is the unexpected turn we took, the yes we said reluctantly, the adventure which emerges when we step out in the middle of a dull day.
 
We merely want to seduce someone and we unexpectedly fall in love. We want to escape tedium and we find meaning. We enter with curiosity and leave with a cornucopia of riches. We are kind and make lifelong bonds. We wake up early with deep reluctance and find the most glorious sunrise of the year.
 
So much of our life is the misadventure, the wrong turn, the searing confession, the moment of vulnerability. And the whole world opens up. All that is required is chutzpah, intent, the ability to look life in the eyes with brazen honesty and say "this is me, flawed yet beautiful, selfish but kind, always open, always learning, always ready."
 
And the universe just whisks us away, into its limitless mysteries.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how love evolves in beautiful ways - 
Aaschi
Bringing THe Storm Home
I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy
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 -
When Life is Beautiful by Kalak
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/when-life-is-beautiful
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Replay - When Did You Say?

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,
 
Sometimes you just know.
 
As someone once said "I knew you were the one, as soon you walked into the room. There was light coming out of your ass!" Frankly, more often then not, love has less drama associated to its arrival, because it is really a feeling which grows and found incrementally, one conversation at a time, one walk at a time, one infraction at a time.
You know there's something happening inside you when there's an unexplainable feeling of excitement and queasiness and anticipation which starts to brew inside.
 
Why queasy, I have often wondered. And the only answer I get is that you start feeling that you are losing control. And it makes you nervous, helpless. But it's a feeling you enjoy, giving into it is akin to some other power taking control of how you feel and act. The more irrational the act you see yourself do, the more you see yourself say things which you didn't know you were capable of saying, the more you realize you are in the power of something transcendental. Something which will now never leave you unscathed or unchanged.
 
Love has made an entry.
 
Life as you know it ceases to exist. Sometimes infinitesimally, sometimes significantly, you find yourself change. Even when the high fades, and love becomes a normal part of what you live with, there's a glow which never leaves you. Even as obsession tapers into normalcy, you know your life is forever touched with magic.
 
The most significant change comes as you stop thinking in singular terms. Is it freedom curtailed, or life enchanted for its inclusion? If there's excitement inside thinking of experiences together, then you are on the way to a twosome. Plurality is only acceptable with its promise of shared experience if one does not consider sharing an encroachment or a loss of freedom.
 
Because love is, in so many ways, an acceptance and an accumulation. It's the difference between being breathless and gasping for breath. In that thin line of differentiation, lies the richness of our choices and the changeability of everything we stand for in life.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the progression of love - 
I Come With Mud
I Said I Love You First
Quietly Yours
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 -
Angels by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Angels
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Sound of a Man Falling

I reach the summit.
 
Not inch by inch—no, I arrive in a flood. Talent spills out of me. Love follows, tidal and unquestioning. Directors orbit me like obedient moons; they cannot imagine a world without my sound. I do not merely compose music—I alter its grammar. I am told I am a miracle. I begin to agree.
 
This is where it breaks.
 
Because admiration, once mistaken for destiny, hardens into entitlement. I begin to believe the applause is owed, not earned. That the place I clawed my way to is permanent, immune to time, taste, or doubt. I convince myself I can offer anything—anything at all—and the world must bow and call it genius. If it doesn’t, the fault lies with the world. They don’t understand music. They don’t understand me.
 
Power arrives quietly. I let it.
 
I summon directors and leave them waiting in the dark, hours stretching thin, just to feel my own gravity. I choose sacred backdrops for first meetings, mistaking symbolism for sanctity. I give indifferent music to a good film and dismiss its failure as “divisive,” because nothing I touch is allowed to be mediocre—only misunderstood.
 
Lines I never meant to draw begin to appear everywhere.
 
Faith, identity, difference—these become instruments too, played without care. When someone enters my home carrying another god, another grammar of devotion, the air tightens. Symbols are stripped, not violently, but casually. As if it is obvious, as if it is necessary. As if genius grants permission.
 
My arrogance is no longer an accident. It is deliberate. Curated. Non-negotiable.
 
I do not spare those who built me. The directors who trusted me when I was still a question mark. The collaborators who believed music was a conversation, not a sermon. One by one, they drift away—not in protest, but in fatigue. Projects thin out. Invitations dry up.
 
And the music—ah, the music.
 
It stumbles. It repeats itself. It loses hunger. But how would I know? I am sealed inside a fog of my own praise, a mausoleum of old triumphs. Self-awareness was buried years ago, quietly, without ceremony.
 
So when the world starts turning elsewhere—towards younger, leaner, less reverential talent—I am stunned. Betrayed. How dare they move on from me?
 
Then comes the mirror I choose because it flatters my wounds.
The foreign interviewer. The sympathetic gaze. The easy narrative. I explain my fading relevance with a single, convenient sentence: it isn’t decline, it’s persecution. Not exhaustion, but exclusion. The industry, I say, is communal. I am being punished for who I am.
 
I believe this because it costs me nothing. It asks nothing of my craft, my humility, my failures.
 
And even when someone who has known me—who has admired me—looks at me and says, almost gently, almost in disbelief, “My god, I never even realised you were Muslim,” the truth still does not land. Because by then I am too deep inside my grievance to hear anything else.
 
I mistake isolation for martyrdom.
 
I retreat into the smallest room imaginable: the ghetto of my own frustration. Religion, the last refuge of the unimaginative and the cornered, becomes my alibi.
 
What I do not see—what I may never see—is the scale of the loss.
 
The hearts that once beat in time with my music and now feel nothing. The silence in concert halls where tickets were bought with devotion and abandoned with disappointment. The audience that did not turn hostile—they simply stopped coming.
 
That is the true heartbreak.
 
Not that I fell. But that I never understood why.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on failures & hypocrisies of people  - 
Mr Hoskote, have you visited Kashmir recently?
Of Failing & Falling
Will We Ever Trust the Skies Again
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 -
Relaxing Piano Improvisation by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/relaxing-piano-improvisation
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Lives of Others

We have to step out of our lives to see what is in the great beyond. Often just outside our gated communities are worlds we know nothing of, lives being lived in ways which we cannot conceive of. Rich, varied, textured, tumultuous. Often beautiful because they are unfiltered and often bleed; frightening because they are so raw.
 
When we encounter these lives, these stories,  we are aghast at their truths and trajectories. They are so rich in their lived-in textures that our own lives seem bland and empty.
 
That's why I love talking to strangers. For their tales and their lives. Each person is a universe, a cornucopia of dreams and desires, often of unrelenting courage, often of failure, anguish and hope.
 
We are woven together through our common place on earth. However much we might think ourselves as special, we are purveyors of the same resources, prisoners to the same gravities, trying to make our lives out of what we have been bequeathed, trying to make more out of what we've got.
 
And when we do this interaction, we are twice blessed - one, when we give the grace of understanding the other, and when we lay ourselves open and vulnerable with own stories.
 
We all want to do well. We all want to do better. But when someone shares tales and hope with us, we are part of the same family of humankind.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how a life is made of so many beautiful things - 
Lemonade at the End of a Buzzing Day
Just Be Air
Stealing Beauty
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 -
Winterland by Frank Schroeter
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/winterland
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Space Between Our Words

Why don't we have honest conversations with the ones we love the most? Why don't we listen - really listen - without comments, without reply, without retort - when they attempt to tell us what hurts, where it hurts, and how the hurt devastates them.
 
So much of the pain we cause, and we feel, is avoidable. Not because we don't tell enough - but because we don't listen enough. The smallest of things becomes intractable, our understanding of what things mean have no relationship to what it actually meant. We don't clarify, we conclude, and are damned for it.
 
Bridges which connect love become chasms, and we stand at both ends and wonder - what happened, how did two beautiful people find their worst selves in the relationship which mattered the most.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the dissonance in relationships  - 
A Love Letter from a Frustrated Husband to an Exasperated wife
A Primer on How to Deal With (Being) Hurt
Lovers Who Synchronise (& those who don't)
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 -
Sehnsucht by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/sehnsucht
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A Poem as a Gift for a Girl With No Confidence in Herself

Poems have a way of showing truths and making us recognize what we are often blind to - that the best we have is adequate and the worst we think we are can also be beautiful.
There is so much we lose out to life because of our fears - of what we think we are, of what others might think we are, of what the world thinks when we fail.
 
The sad truth is - nobody cares. Everybody is immersed in their own stories, and beyond a flurry of gossip, have scarcely any mind space for anybody else.
 
Only the ones who care for us, are the ones who feel for us, in ways which are genuine and true and beautiful.
 
And when they hold us close, in spite (and often because) of what we are, we become the beauty they see in us, we are rendered marvellous, we see the infinite in ourselves because that is the core of us - the boundless possibility, the opening of a flower inside us, the feeling of being with the divine, of being blessed.
 
And all because someone found us worthy of time, of attention. Of a sliver of love. Maybe a poem.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how we blossom into the person we should be - 
Lemonade at the End of a Buzzing Day
I Have Watched You Make the Ordinary Holy
When We Know Love as Found
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 -
Feelings 2 by Frank Schroeter
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/feelings-2
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

I Think I Can Be An Adventure With You

As new year eves crack our worlds open into two - a past and a future - albeit as tenuous in concept as they come, deep inside we know the celebrations - like those we do for birthdays - is just messaging of mortality for all things we hold dear.
 
And embedded within that reality is our realization that the experiences and relationships we live and seek and want to linger in are what sustains and gives meaning to our breath, the limited number that we have.
 
The songs we hear together, the storms we take shelter from, the books we cry together to, the traumas we live together through. Life's fullness manifests itself in our life through our shared experiences. Moments ripen into full fruits when we experience them as summer, letting its warmth flood us into sweet submission.
 
Our lives our only half of their possibility if we consider the indulgences which enrich our lives as ordinary. Or things in passing. The kisses we steal, the hands we hold in the dark, the crook of our arms we give for rest, are more precious to remembrance when we look back than any tinsel star or success in passing. Public adulation is the worst. It engulfs us without redemption, leaving us hungrier for being there, and empty when it passes away.
 
I'm quite sure god lives his life through what we do. And I think the sensory is what he would remember, the unexpected adventure, the advent of serenity because we chose to do nothing one winter morning but sit with our ageing father to look out onto the changing skies.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beauty of things pass - 
When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
One Summer
Rediscovering Heaven
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 -
Liberty Quest by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/liberty-quest
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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