Uncut Poetry

Aaschi

'Aaschi' is a beautiful Bengali word. It’s used when you are leaving home - for work, for pleasantries, for whatever. You say it to the folks you are leaving behind. Instead of saying “I’m going” you say “Aaschi”, which means “I’m coming back.” And this one simple word becomes a promise to return, a pledge that the parting is temporary. In its intonation, meaning and feeling, it’s an intimacy.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the tenderness of love  -
Extraordinary Life
Tenderness
Fallen Flowers
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: Village Ambiance by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6586-village-ambianceLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Finding Ways To Survive (Each Other)

Some relationships are doomed. They get off to a bad start, and never hit their stride. Or find their autumn of distrust early, and see no reason to change the season. Often a passing reaction is presumed to be a permanent opinion. Sometimes it’s something shallow, but in the face - hair in the sink, slurping of soup, insensitivity with a joke. The reasons can be myriad. But the rusting which sets in starts its irreversible corrosion.
 
But relationships have their own dynamics. And often circumstances erode jointings, but do not snap them apart. It could be habit, it could be compulsion, it could be happenstance, it could be forbearance, it could be foolhardiness. But some relationships sway like trees in storms, bend, go wild, but are not dislodged from their moorings. Something mysterious holds them down, refusing to let  them be dislodged.
 
And that’s the alchemy of bonds, the mysterious gold dust masquerading as rust. A glue. Is it the effulgence of time, a passage of conciliations, or the despair of circumstance? Who knows. But in the midst of mayhem, there could be a grudging unobstructive growth of recognition, tenderness - axis aligned! - love.  Because the awning of love offers shelter even though it not be a place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. But those are things already encountered, faced, survived. What remains then is a mysterious island of light and tranquility.
 
As Bell Hooks said “Living in a culture where we are encouraged to seek a quick release from any pain or discomfort has fostered individuals who are easily devastated by emotional pain, however relative. When we face pain in relationships, our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
 
And that’s when we “flee from love before we feel it’s grace.”
 
Pain may be the threshold we must cross to partake of love’s bliss. But if we continuously run from the pain, we will never know the fullness of love’s pleasure.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of surviving love's inequities  -
The One Who Left (Herself Behind)
In The Winter of Our Relationships
Flutter
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: Relaxing Guitar by LironFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7722-relaxing-guitarLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Replay: Lose A Lover Not A Friend

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!
Too little, I feel, is talked about heartbreak which arises from friendships which come unstuck. It’s almost as if it doesn’t require comment or commiseration if it’s not love. There’s injustice there.  When the truth is that closely wrought bonds which are non sexual often give more shelter to the soul than love can ever do. Friendship is a live-in relationship for the soul. Where everything precious holds true, but no bond paper is signed. Friendship often frees you more preciously than how love binds you. 
 
Vikram Seth wrote in his poem, A Style of Loving - 
 
Light now restricts itself
To the top half of trees;The angled sunSlants honey-coloured raysThat lessen to the groundAs we bike throughThe corridor of Palm DriveWe twoHave reached a safety the yearsCan claim to have created:Unconsummated, thereforeUnjaded, unsated.Picnic, movie, ice-cream;Talk; to clear my headHot buttered rum - coffee for you;And so not to bedAnd so we have set the questionAside, gently.Were we to become loversWhere would our best friends be?You do not wish, nor ITo risk againThis savoured light for noon'sHigh joy or pain.
 
Love seeks adventure, friendship is already one; love is cautious as there is so much breakable which is at stake, but friendship thrives on risk - without it it withers, dies. There is reverse alchemy in friendship. What would life be without the wild indulgences with friends - the late nights, the drives, drinking binges, closing up to each other’s secrets, opening up to our  black holes. There is a bond of shared blood between friends which no amount of shared intimacy between lovers can ever be able to replace.
 
Friendships do turn to love affairs. And if expectations don’t drown its unfettered madness and outrageous  indulgences and intravenous bonding, it would be the greatest love affair possible.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of possibilities of friendship and love  -
A Summery Love Story (in the middle of winter) 
It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away
Call Me By Your Name
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 -
The Zone by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/270-the-zoneLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

The Love Story of An Accountant & A Poet

I have often looked at couples who are so different from each other that together they seem to move like oil and water.  And then I blink and look again, and I see a strange alchemy at work - a layering more than a blending, stitched crochet then a cocktail, a sun-entrenched day than smog. And they progressively look like a gorgeously-knitted piece of warm-wear together.
 
How do people who seem to have nothing in common get attracted to each other, and then find that balance which is the merging of maps and diversities? How do heaven and earth meet?
 
It’s simplistic to say that if someone loves talking, the perfect match is the person who is a great listener. Or the aggressive one needs the calm presence beside her. Habits can be nature, but they need nurturing to be character. And people who gravitate towards each other do so because something in them has transcended the constraints of skin-deep deterrents and found something subtler inside to connect to.
 
A poet might then be drawn to the accountant, because both recognise they are artistes, merely writing on different media. An actress can then be seduced easily by the sportsman because both revel in the creative and the risky. The social butterfly might love the slow retiring kind because she finds her resting space in him. The ties which bind have roots deep in the chemistry of our beings.
 
 
Contrasts also gravitate towards each other to fill unseen emptinesses inside. The man tongue-tied and tied up because of being shut up throughout his life is completely blown away by the brazen and the bold. The woman surrounded 24 hours in a vortex of talk, energy and confusion will plunge headlong into a man who seems to be an ocean of calmness and gravitas. Often such contrasts turn out to be false manifestations of shallow beings, and the bond crumbles in the face of revelations. But when it conjoins into a fulfilment of what a true seeker finds, it is like a holy union, an alliance made in heaven.
 
Angelita Lim said "I saw that you were perfect, and so I loved you. Then I saw that you were not perfect and I loved you even more." Maybe, then, the dynamics of relationships are the universe’s tease, it’s magic to make life an exhilarating and often unexpected trip.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ironies of love:
The Comfort of Her Being
Infinite Tenderness
The 101 of How To Praise (someone you love)
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: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4533-toccata-and-fugue-in-d-minorLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
The following music was used for this media project:Music: Passage Of Time by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10005-passage-of-timeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
 

For Nothing More Than A Look Of Me

Don’t we complicate our lives too much?
With our desire for more, and then for much more, for affirmations, and then reaffirmations. For a continuous acknowledgment that not only do we matter, but - that we matter more than anybody else. It’s not enough to be together; we want words which confirm that our togetherness matters. We want cards, messages, heart-shaped emojis, birthday presents, outings, likes to our posts. Things which can be seen or talked about. Our feelings can’t only be felt, they need to take the route of the tangible.
We exist in a  chaos of desire.
And. In the process, ignoring, time and again,  what comes unobtrusively, on soft padded paws, in ways which often can’t be seen - but can always be felt, if we only stop to breathe and notice,
Both of you quietly reading your own books, as she slowly slides onto your shoulder into sleep. She working on her desk on a Sunday, and you walking upto the door, checking her out, and leaving quietly. Both of you listening to the same music, one AirPod each. Holding hands because they are there to be held. Looking at the same painting for long minutes and then turning to find that both of you have tears in your eyes. Turning back in the middle of a fight into a hug.
In our litany of anguish we are often in search of redemption, but stay to linger in wounds. So how do we acknowledge tough times?
By not bothering her when her brows are knitted, to not admonish him when things go wrong, to listen (really listen) when he complains, to be a weathervane to moods, to be grateful for the good times and see one’s being fill up with grace.
The little things, the smallest littlest things. To be alive to their possibility and their manifestation. To know that if you have to think about the last day of your life, it would be no more, and no less, than spending time with both your feet out in the sun, dozing sporadically, but her hand in yours, and talking of what passes as feelings, fleeting, of how through the drudgery and heartbreak of life, both of you are still able to find each other's simple beauty of presence.
Love really is the quietest feeling in the world.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the tenderness of love:
A Summery Love Story (in the middle of winter)
I Never wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy
Capturing the Feeling
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: About Moments by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/235-about-momentsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Ruins Have Permanent Flames

Old age is often a sadness, not so much for the slowing and breaking down of the body’s machinery, but because how it brings invisibility to the aged. Because if there is one section of people who are ignored, as if they don’t exist, it is often the aging. As the world swirls around them, with all it’s passion, conflict, confusion, interaction, conversation, they are there, in the middle of the whirlpools - they are seen - and then unseen.
 
Nobody seems to have time for the old.
 
There they sit, quietly, often in a corner, observing the drama, silent with their opinion (maybe they were once told roughly not to interfere?), thinking of how they had faced similar situations, knowing how things would turn out - but, alas,  never turned to, never asked for.
 
By being ignored, they are rendered static in the daily flow of life. They are bathed and alert, seated and waiting, looking tentatively into the busyness of their loved ones’ lives, asking softly what was up, what was the rush, if there was any help required - but are brushed off - gently, by a good soul; not so gently, by the one who thinks them to be a waste of time.
 
And they sit quietly, with their newspapers and memories, hushed tones and shaded looks, both proud and concerned. They see the living dynamos, with their blood in them, making a life of their own, with their own choices and decisions; but often immolating themselves in self-lit fires. And then unasked, they get up from their wheelchairs, and break open the glass door of the fire extinguisher, and save the souls of their offspring, the way they did when they were young.
 
And suddenly, the invisible become visible. The useless become useful. The extinct become extant.
 
I remember Almodovar’s Talk To Her, where a male nurse spent years talking to a woman who was in a coma, who probably did not comprehend a single word of what was being spoken, who probably had little chance of recovery, but does so because he loves her. I often wonder what stops us from doing the same with the elderly in our family, when they are not even comatose, and would be absorbing of what we say, observant in what they give. In our hierarchy of choices, we would rather exult in the digital euphoria of social media than have the slow patience to savour the quiet delight of a life fully-lived.
 
If only we go beyond our professed love for our parents and other ageing loved ones, and actually spent time with them, with words or merely sharing silences, we will come back, awash in light and drenched in gratitude. Attention is the soul and water and sunshine for an ageing soul.
 
As the sun sets, and we revel in its afterglow, grace fills our soul, and the tenderness of what we give comes back to us and makes us malleable and alive.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the inevitabilities of life:
She Held His Hand As He Drifted
A Garden of Departures
An Epitaph Made of Light & Air
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: Relaxation [instrumental, sounds of birds] by Edvardas SenFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10002-relaxation-instrumental-sounds-of-birdsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

She Held His Hand As He Drifted

The irrevocability of death is a given.
 
Even as I can't ever reconcile to it, I sit in awe at its messy discipline. It tears worlds asunder, leaves pain in its wake, splits, often destroys,  but moves unreconciled and unrelenting. Sometimes it gives a little air, some space - not a dawn of hope, but a sunbeam - as a vestige, but then again moves across the firmament to find its west - and waste.
 
As we sit beside the hospital bed of a loved one, and pray, even if it’s for one more breath, deep inside we know it is against all natural laws.  But hope is what we live on. I still remember the story of the Mughal king Babur, whose son Humayun was lying nearing death, and he went around his bed three times, praying to the almighty, for the exchange of life for life, to give his son's illness to him in exchange of Babur’s health, and it happened, his son was saved.
 
It’s a desperate thought for a despairing heart.
 
Just as death is really a passage through life, for the surviving - the bereaved, the ones left behind -  death of a loved one is a transition, from a sensory world of togetherness to an estranged world of isolation. With a numb realisation we realise how much we are made, of what we get from those closest to us.  Their demise then is like the opening of a yawning gap, something which often never fills again. It’s the absence of a voice, a touch, a quiet glance, a secret smile. It is the thinking together, it is the sharing of silences, of a bowl of soup, of seeing a sunbeam together. Of shivering in the cold, of finding warmth, of drinking coffee, of arguing, of hugging, of saying goodbye on the doorstep knowing, come evening and you would meet again.
 
And then all of a sudden, we realise how the absence of one life diminishes our whole world. Our accomplishments are not enough without the ardent cheerleader, our presence is not significant without that someone’s acknowledgment, a life we might be living in multiples is forever laid to rest as a lonely singularity.
 
A loved one's mortal body dies once, and we, the survivors, die multiple times inside.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on death's call:
When Breath Becomes Air
Departures
What Do I Leave Behind
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 music is a mantra for the peace of a departed soul, performed by Sahil Jagtiani, from the album "Om Namo Narayanaya Chanting".
 

No Revolution Is Complete Without A Ruined Soul

"I look back to see
if I had left behind trails
of my voice, as if that mattered more
than if they had reached."
 
I stay in Calcutta, and wherever I walk I know I do so on hallowed ground, unseen but still fallow with the blood of revolutionaries. It’s another matter that whilst some of it was a fight for freedom, some of it was misguided, for things which revolutionaries themselves lost sight of. The fight was for a cause - but often for the fight itself. But, foolish or brave, nobody could doubt the valour or the intensity.
 
At the beginning of this year, I looked back with some despair at my fraught world, and I looked forward with some trepidation. And what emerged in me was a memoir of times I had trudged through, as also a strange memorial for things still to come.
 
But I had promised myself something a long time back - on that quibble called hope. Friends told me that hope was a fool’s lifeboat, riddled with holes, forgone to disaster. But I had always held that it still floated, and to mix metaphors,  it was still sweeter than the acid of cynicism, which corroded even as it breathed.
 
But what the despair made me do was to doubt my voice, question it’s potency, ask about its reachability. What it made me do is to question if everybody’s pain needed to be seen with the same heart, if one wound needed to be tended and another ignored.
 
What would this world do to my soul?
 
And that’s where I want myself and this world to again seek innocence. To trust, to have faith, to laugh, to love - and maybe get destroyed in the process, but at least live what is left of life in the high castle of hope.
 
It’s a beguiling wish from a fool. But there are too many stories of fools who have been destroyed but whose mere idea has made us live with love, dignity and passion.
 
A life lived with this is no mean success, however curtailed it might be.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on identity and hope:
Yes
And I Know These of You
Difficult Child
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 -
Music: Stormpath by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9816-stormpathLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Comfort of Her Being

Life is a pean of reaffirmations. In its hurly-burly urgencies we often forget that what anchors us is often the humdrum boring comfort of relationships which let us be what we are. We can say anything knowing our love won’t be questioned, we can take people for granted without our intentions being put into a dock, we can let silences surround us knowing them to be as potent as a conversation.
 
But to get to that state is to first embark on a journey. Relationships take time. They have to be transversed through the hills and valleys, yes, but also through the pots and pans, of life. There are glorious sunsets to get lost in but also the harshness of singular floodlights. There are triumphs of togetherness to hold on to, as also the bouts of lonely lookouts. There are the warm summer evenings to linger in but also the biting cold of an aching heart. There is time seamlessly bequeathed but also the tiptoeing when none is given.
 
The irony of relationships is that if you survive the scrounging of lees in an unending chasm, you will enjoy the riches of the rocks of togetherness. Because what sustains a couple is a mysterious alchemy of the understandable and felt, shown and realised, the brusque and the smooth. With the ones closest to us, too much is often made of too little. The challenge is always then to not mistake  the ephemeral for a fact, just as we often mistake the windblown emotion as a determinant of intention.
 
Though the longevity of a relationship is scarcely an indicator of it’s quality, the long trudge HAS to be undertaken to understand every strand of a person’s being. It takes time to understand that couples are conjoined not only because of what they are but because of what they have survived, which, in the schemata of engagement, often means surviving each other.  Victims of love always bleed. But the survivors are the ones who hold their hands and find the sun burnishing their skin into gold.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on yearning:
The One Who Left (Herself Behind)
The Passing of Autumn
And She Waited For My Call
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 -
Music: Satisfaction by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/339-satisfactionLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Falling Into A New Year

A new year is just an artificial break for us to catch our breath, simmer down and look back to see the terrain we have travelled. There’s nothing good or bad - there are only things to either celebrate or to learn from. The wisest of us has done the stupidest of things - and are often better and happier for it. In thought, word or action we have all transgressed - we have sinned, plotted, cursed. The steam of our desires, obsessions, yearnings have found its outlet. We have some ashes left behind, some remembrance, or just that guilty happy feeling, which somehow fills our life’s crevices.
 
What we can’t do is to live life with cracks, regrets. To look back or forward and only see impossibilities. There are too many slivers of light surrounding our days for us not to find one to hold onto and climb out of this grim world. All we need is faith, the belief that at the end of the shaft, the bottom of the chasm, or where light turns to darkness, there is something which awaits us, something which we will fall in love with, which speaks to us. Where we can let go, and know there is nothing but a flight ahead.
 
So onwards, my loves, there’s always something left to celebrate and fall in love with! Revel!
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how time adn tides wait for none:
Let Life Break Your Heart
How I Stumbled in My Search for Eternity
I Am A Residue of Life
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 -
Music: Rising Sun by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/86-rising-sunLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license