Uncut Poetry

On Growing Up (that haze of sunshine & dust)

Growing up, and the art of doing nothing. How I wish I was again sure of the former and a master of the latter. Because I’ve lived years, often without experiencing anything new, and fill my time - and myself - so much that there is no place left to give wings to my choices or desires.
 
I still remember the days when I naturally knew what was important -  reading, and thinking about what I  read; talking, and then letting long silences puncture my words; of waking up, and watching a random tree outside my window sway; of sitting at the dining table, of mum waxing eloquent about a new technique of soil petrification, and dad taking a spoonful and saying “This is good”, and a silence descending, punctured only by the sounds of blissful chewing. The choices were simpler, and unbeknownst to us, we were creating nooks for return, for solace.
 
In our tumbling, involved worlds now, we are heroes of the rote, progenitors of the already parsed, masters of the cliched, slaves to the routine. We don’t change rhythms, we don’t stop on the way to the office, we have an iron grip on whom we meet, we are shy for the new, we are afraid of the unobvious. In the immensity of possibilities, we pick a few strands and tie our world with them - and think it’s gift-wrapped.
 
A friend wrote in, when a poem from 9 years back popped up on her Facebook feed - “I miss those times of poetry, conversations, simplicity.” A flood of pleasure ran through me just thinking of those days. It’s easy to say that we’d moved on (the truth), it’s useless to say “let’s return” because we can’t. Every time is a different time, and we are in many ways different people - what connected us then was that magical alchemy of time which presented us with the plain brass of time which we turned into pure gold. Nothing can bring back that transition - yes, because it was that - as the rabbit hole of life is always destined to take us somewhere else.
 
Nostalgia is a bitch, but it serves a purpose. It reminds us that what is valuable to our memory is because that time was particularly lived in. It brings into our sensibilities the need to immerse ourselves into the ride and stop chasing shadows. To experience the leakages of time as the stream to slip on, to try not to multiply moments into meaning.
 
And minutiae becomes life - to give your sister’s hair time enough to grow, to let things pass such that the first wrinkle does appear on your mother’s face, to let our father’s laughter resound like echo inside us long after it’s last note has drifted, to let flowers float and be grounded.
 
In our realisation of the drift of time, lies the possibility of it becoming permanent parts of our being.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joy and tribulations of growing up:
Letting Go (a childhood song)
When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
Those Days of a Lost Summer
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.
 
Following is the music used in this episode -
 
Music: Weightless by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightlessLicense: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Music: Endless Expanses by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9124-endless-expansesLicense: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
 
 

My Mother is Full of Water and Ready for Sonography

Our relationship to our mothers is a supple thing. Day to day, year to year, age to age, it changes. Beyond the evolutionary grounding, beyond the nurturing necessities, we are an amalgam of the obvious and the extraordinary. To be gifted the kind of unprecedented unflinching support we do get from mothers is a benediction of nature. Our steady rejection of it, and her holding tight to the tethers, is the obvious unravelling which this relationship goes through - her instinct becomes a need, the child’s need for her transitions to become a burden.
 
And then there’s an inflexion point when things come to a head. Often in the teens, often later - it doesn’t matter when. What does matter is that it’s almost a rebellion of a kind. Things start breaking down as if everything was fragile to begin with, as if the relationship was nothing more than that of a food-provider and laundry-doer. And the tie is suddenly fraught with the consequences of unreconciled pain.
 
Succour is often found elsewhere.
 
And therein often lies the genesis of the fracture - the bird seeks to fly out of the nest, but the nester is still not done with the chick.
 
But relationships are both the present and the unravelling. A lot of its pain is the passage, though it’s joy is retrospective. And though we might be nostalgic as we look back, we might actually have come out through a long tunnel of pain. But in spite of all its rockiness, a mother remains a symbol of our breath. The sooner we let that one thought overshadow everything else, we would have let ourselves understand the meaning of the most meaningful relationship in our life.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on our times with our mothers:
Mother's Rambling Lessons on Life Imparted in Morning Walks in My Childhood
My Mother's Lines
How Mothers Are Nature's Return Gifts
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: AnotherDramaticScene by Lilo SoundFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6137-anotherdramaticsceneLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms and Lovers in Spate

Rain, amongst all seasons, is as much feeling as occurrence. In spite of all its deleterious effects - on roads, homes, countries - log-jammed lanes, traffic jams, leaky roofs, economic devastations! - it can never be bereft of its poetry, it’s memory of growing pangs, it’s matte occurrences of comfort, tea and satisfying dissatisfactions.
 
Everyone has a rain-infused remembrance. The peerless newsletter ‘The Nook’ had a get-together to reminisce about people and their memories of rains -
 
“One (of the participants) brought with them the rains of Kerala, with their many names and each a peculiar character.
 
Another told us of the monsoons in the hills, of mothers and grandmothers climbing concrete roofs and fixing them while children hold buckets and gather stones that roll off.
 
We shared stories of running across paddy fields, our feet tickling; tales of a small family on a three-wheeler devouring patties that we too could taste in our mouths.
 
We were transported to a bustling street in Delhi brought to its knees by the rain. We became kids floating paper boats in puddles, lovers stealing a kiss in the backseat while the driver’s distracted by the romance of the windshield wipers and the rain.”
 
Indeed!
For lovers, the rains are the perfect playlist.
 
Gentle, harsh, insistent, soothing. The world inside finds a rhythm with the world outside. Being inside a time when time doesn’t matter is life’s finest benediction, one which lovers embrace with casual ease, knowing, possibly for the first time in their lives, that the world can wait.
 
And that then is the bittersweet legacy of the monsoons. Of being so close to life that thereafter it doesn’t matter - and then to immediately lose that lesson. In living through the rains, we are filled to the brim with both life’s grace and possibilities. If only we let the aftermath be a continuum.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the romance of rain:
Bringing the Storm Home
Dancing in the Rains
Making Love in a Church on a Stormy Day
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: Parting of the Ways - Part 2 by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4196-parting-of-the-ways-part-2License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Yearning (and other things we carry in the journey)

Who are we, if not people who live on hope, thought to thought, day to day, year to year. Often knowing about possibilities, often just whistling in the wind. It could be a change of fortune, a lucky break, a chance encounter, a person we’d always loved. Everything, even what seems to be the minutest of an incident, has the potential to change lives, and more often than not, it does.
 
And until it does, hope binds us to invisible tethers.
 
Gurus talk about yearning, as they talk about the journey, and remind us not to lose the experience of what we go through.
 
To know that the journey of feelings is often more precious than what we finally get.
 
The untetheredness of anguish, the ecstasy of possibility, the world building, the smart turn of phrase, the laughter, the look, the sheer joy of something which could only be defined as tender. That is the road to finally getting something. Heartbreakingly , and retrospectively, when we finally get - what we wanted, who we wanted, how we wanted - it is often bereft of glory. Compared to the striving, what we finally get seems so much lesser - less glittering, less flawless, less satisfying.
 
And thus go things in life, and thus do love stories find their beginnings, their middles and their ends. Too many affairs end at the consummation. And it would be a tragedy to have that as the only remembrance - and not the tease and the expectation and the imagination and the excessive giving and the extravagance leading towards it all.
 
And because of that, every story stands stunted, it’s rich repository of the best of what we human beings are capable of lying discarded with a sheen of regret, as if it meant for nothing. When the truth is that this is what we actually live for.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the urgings and yearning:
Miles Apart
Gather Me
Aaschi (a promise)
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: Odyssee by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/56-odysseeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Memory Keeper

The bane of my life has been my memory. I forget. I forget prodigiously. Names, faces, conversations. Don’t even get me to started on dates and numbers, groan. In office, at home, I struggle with narrating incidents, at remembering places, things we saw and ate at specific places.
 
I had a girl who worked for me who, after a decade, still remembered the make of the shirt and the colour of socks I’d worn when I’d first interviewed her.
 
I guess there are bigger tragedies in life (people are still dying hungry!), but more than a patchy whitewash of remembrance, this creates a strange spiritual hole in me, which I carry as regret inside me.
 
But on the flip side, I have also forgotten grievances and regrets, I forget details of battles,  I’ve forgotten details of when friends had tried to pull fast ones on me, the pain some had left, the times I’d weeped into the night because words had hurt. I’d forgotten the details, soon I’d forgotten who’d said or done what.
 
Forgetfulness then is just another way for forgiveness. 
 
But there are deeper cuts.
 
I’ve forgotten details of the afternoon when my son was born, I’ve forgotten the look on my dad’s face (ecstatic I’m told) when I’d passed my first professional exams. Or my mother’s hug (unending, I’m told) when she held the first copy of my first book. I’ve forgotten words spoken softly to me, poems written for me, silences I’ve shared, the memories of hands held in crowded rooms, playing the fool, the hi jinks.
 
The entirety of what is gone is like a lost country of reminiscence.
 
And that hurts.
 
What then remains is an existential mystery, where I pathetically flounder inside the lost meadows of my own heart. My happiness itself seems ragged and pockmarked and I walk around within a permanent cave of dissatisfaction.
 
I wish sometime I would have a memory keeper, like the old royalty had - someone doing a record-keeping celestially or by being beside me.
 
This poem is then a seeking of a blessing,  a gently yearning desire to remember, and if that’s not possible, have someone I  love to remember for me.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hauntings of memory:
Letting Go (a childhood song)
The Passing of Autumn
When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
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
 

Replay: Favourite People (Who We Love and Leave)

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!
 
We are what we are. But we are also all the people who have arrived, moved on, stayed in our lives. People whose very touch may feel like a hug or an abandonment , a benediction or a scare. People we’ve loved  and fought with, people we’ve been secretive about, those we’ve cried for, those who’ve cried because of us. Just as relationships change, we are changeable too.
 
We are what we are. But we are also the slipstream of our old loves, the undercurrent of those who hurt us, the flotsam of those we wronged. We are also the pressed flowers of compliments, kept long after the fragrance has gone; we are the lees of the good times which make us remember springs and mists; we are the dregs of the nights of short tempers and long knives.
 
There is so much that is extraordinary in mundane lives, that one wonders what is evanescent and what stays. Would the quiet moment in a sun drop count? Would a poem which made me cry stay? Would the fleeting memory of a summer love still overwhelm after years?
 
How does memory work? Is it a crucible or a sieve? Does it hold what it does to keep it shimmering and intact for an insignificant day? Or does it let everything percolate down into a cesspool of oblivion, just keeping back those morsels which then find place in our souls.
 
Every one of us then is an amalgam of the dullness and magic of every person we meet, every feeling we feel, every hurt we give, every bruise we carry. We are never merely the wind and the woods, the street and the home - we are also the stars, the black holes, the pulsars  - we are the whole universe.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on resolving relationships  -
I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy
Capturing The Feeling 
Stories Which Survive
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-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de

Miles Apart

I have always wondered about those who are in love and stay cities away from each other, and colleagues who are ready to stay apart for their careers. And I’m gobsmacked at how they make it happen. I’ve asked several of them about it, and the answer is always accompanied by a sigh and the answer “Life.” As if what determined their choices was something out of their control. Which was of course both true and not true.
 
But I was more interested in how they made it happen? How they kept their feelings of tenderness and care alive, how did they show their best and their worst to each other, how could they bridge the gap of physicality and touch  - all the ingredients which are so essential for a relationship to breathe and exist.
 
Can sulking have the same impact across zoom? How can kissing on phone substitute for the real thing? Without a body beside you, do you slowly start preferring your solitary conquering of the bed? Whom do you turn to when nightmares or worse crises hit you? Do you discover that an empty home has teeth and too many dark corners?
 
Does a conjoined love story finally find its own solitary life story?
 
It is easy to promise to each other that you are the start and the end of a tie, that when the moonbeam hits the pillow beside yours you are filled with an ache which just doesn’t go. Because distances erode. Because nothing can substitute the look of an eye, the deep hidden ring of a guffaw, the comfort and continuing thrill of a safe and familiar touch. We are finally physical people, who flower in presence - there is one sun in the sky to fill the world with its nourishment but one in our lives to fill us with the glow and nurture so essential for our souls.
 
However much our hearts are full of what we mean for each other, there’s a point where our yearning will ask a question - and with great chagrin we will discover that the answers are no longer clear.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the difficulties of relationships  -
Love (then) Is Also Patience
I Should Have Loved More Wisely (they say)
Love's Night of The Long Knives
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: Memories by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8554-memoriesLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

One Quiet Woman is Much Like Another

Agency! Agency! That’s what people would say - women lack agency, that self-respect, which would allow them to accept no nonsense from their partners. Violence? Infidelity? These were lines which once crossed were unretractable, unforgivable.
 
But women do the unthinkable - they scream and shout, but they also forgive, they also stay on. And in that one decision seems to lie embodied their helplessness, as they sacrifice their intrinsic force, jettison their innate power, lay down their weaponry  without stepping into the fighting ring.
 
Or - is that true?
 
Are these the contradictions which women of our age display - strong in peacetime, weak in battle? Brilliant in picking out the diamonds, floundering in the play in the dirt? 
 
But here’s the catch - are they ironically being stronger for it?
 
Because when you step back, and look at people like you would look at stars - with both wonder and perspective - you realise that maybe, maybe, it all matters so little. Foibles are weaknesses, the one who is beautiful in body is often the weakest in spirit, that however gnarled the deed, human beings are also intrinsically gorgeous. That from a past fraught with conflict, there comes a realisation of the most soul-searching kind.  That in the universe of people, there are bound to be hurtling comets along with the stars, out of control, with strange inner workings, but who also might be gentle souls, whose generosity makes them leave their light behind, long after they are gone.
 
And through the pain of being taken for granted, of being cheated, of facing inequities, there is a dawn of realisations and reconciliations. Because people change. Because couched in the worst of us, often lies our most vulnerable parts which might be the reason for what we do. For when people crack, often it lets out the acid, venom and bile which was poisoning everything inside, by accumulating without any way to run out.
 
People change. There are multiple dawns inside them. And reincarnations. There’s so much which burns up and burns out. They are often destroyed before they re-emerge as the best versions of what they always were but did not - maybe could not - show.
 
Often there is no patience for this, often no scope, no width, no chance. Often the tidal waves of distress and pain of loved ones are enough to inundate whole lives. It’s a valid reaction. They are consumed by circumstances. And find their best selves compromised by the worst their partners can show.
 
Maybe, maybe, that is fine too.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on truth and untruths - 
The Truth of Lies
Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys
How She Knew (that he was unfaithful)
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: Atlantis by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8784-atlantisLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Compatriots of Trust

It’s so easy to say that trust is absolute. That what is trustworthy has to be fully so, or not at all. In the grey complexities of life, it’s both the toughest give and often an unreasonable ask.
 
Humans are fragile, they are also duplicitous. They lie, betray a trust of years, but are ironically ready to lay their lives on line when it comes to things they care for - and for those whose very trust they may have betrayed. Ensconced in the biggest tragedy of human nature often lies it’s gold mine. Because if there’s one truth which sustains our relationships and keeps things afloat is our changeability, our evolution. We learn, we relearn, as life goes on we rediscover priorities, within our wounds we find the kernel of redemption.
 
But the tragedy lies with the victims, the ones whose trust is betrayed. Because they lie injured, hurt, their belief in tatters, and their very core shaken. For them to go back to a more pristine time in such a relationship is asking for the impossible. How can such a person ever trust again? And that is where we have to steel ourselves.
 
When I stand in front of someone who has betrayed me, these are the two thoughts I hold inside. Will my trust be again forsaken? Can I be the same again with this person? Time will tell. But I will force myself to give it a shot. I will set up a personal ecosystem of  forgiveness and communication. And I have the company of author Maya Angelou, who in her inimitably gentle and forthright way said “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
 
But author Shannon L Adler said something very revealing years back which I haven’t forgotten  - “People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.”  I have held that thought as close to my heart as I have Jesus’s exhortation “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone.”
 
Life's navigation through trust issues thus find its granular path to resolution.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on things which wound our souls  -
If I Commit Suicide
Finding Ways to Survive (Each Other)
No Revolution is Complete Without a Ruined Soul
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: Weightless by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightlessLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

If I Commit Suicide

If I commit suicide, it will be on a happy day. I would wrap the day as efficiently as I would wrap my life. Instructions clear, bank accounts safe, investments earmarked. I would make your favourite dish (stuffed aubergine with sun dried tomatoes), serve it with garlic bread, call in your favourite ice cream (Jamoca Almond Fudge) and have a glass of chianti on the side, as you look on in wonder. I would watch you with pleasure as the sun sets and fills you with its glow.
 
In the end, I would have attempted to give you what neither you nor I could give each other - care. Oh, I am not fussing the good things, which we performed with discipline - we would always end our days with our duty to each other completed to perfection.
 
But we would also be - polite but insidious, thoughtful but sarcastic: we would hollow each other, tired of figuring out each other’s metaphors.
 
For we had become proficient in knowing what hurt both of us, as we talked of making sense and losing our minds. We always thought we would find love right in front of each other, preordained, either as a beginning or as a finality, but instead we found storms brewing in living rooms and broken teacups in the backyards.
 
What is it about ordinary lives that it’s intimations of helplessness are far more severe than the defeat of a cherished dream?
 
Thought by thought, remark by remark, word by word, we were chipped, alienated, distanced. Until we were frightened of ourselves, doubtful of our very place in the universe, and felt undeserving of the sheltering skies or the unquestioning beauty of the world.
 
There’s so much I will miss. Stories of others where they’d found the meaning which had always eluded me, empty chairs left behind after the music was over and we overflowed, the slant of flower-laden boughs as they smiled and encroached into my walk, the careless spread of broken blossoms lying as inspiration, the warm glow of evenings without chatter or insistences.
 
But then it would all be overlaid with the intonations of familiar voices as they slowly entangled me as aural nooses. That’s when I knew it was time.
 
It would be appropriate that I would leave so serenely, as my entire life has been an exercise in evolving quietly in the backyards of my own despair, so much so that I would bleed and I myself would not know.
 
Who says suicide is drama where the protagonist doesn’t know the end? I know. I know you will break, you will be inconsolable - but not irreparable. You are strong and practical. And you will find solace in my note which would unequivocally say it was not your fault. That it was my choice, my choice alone. You will be massively inconvenienced but not irreconcilably. You will regret my guts to give in fatally and finally  to my anguish - after all, we had our own happy metre to figure out who made the other more melancholic.
 
I will probably play Maksim’s Hana’s Eyes,  as I would lie back and let my life leave me behind as a shell without any sense of presence. I was always a murmur, I will leave as a whisper.
 
I hope I will finally come home to me.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on death and its redemptions  -
When Breath Becomes Air
The Things We Become When We Leave
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 following music was used for this media project:Music: Heart Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Music: Sunset at Glengorm by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4437-sunset-at-glengormLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license