Uncut Poetry

Ceremony of Longing

"Often I see myself hiding inside myself
wondering how many biographies of pain
will I see as my own."
 
It’s almost a cliché to say that we are much more the reaction then what we are in the action. It is not ideal, but it is a reality. Our lives are touched at a million sensory points throughout the day. Stories, requests, exhortations, kindnesses, things we say which boomerang, acts we do which come back to us as benediction. We are an amalgam of what we give and what we get - and what we make of all of it for ourselves. 
 
And what drives us ever so often is longing. A longing to connect, a longing to be the chosen one, a longing, very often, to be at the wrong end of the stick, but to have known that we were, in some way, the chosen one. And in that recognition often lies the leitmotif of our lives. How can we transverse this earth without being noticed? Without knowing that we meant for something. Knowing that what we wrote, thought, said, did, did make a difference. 
 
Our lives then are a combination of curiosity, creation and craving. Our connections build on that. There’s nothing extraordinary which our lives then seek. Just that we notice, get noticed - and find out peace in that ordinariness. 
 
Note - The name of the poem is named after a performance piece curated by the exceptional dancer Diya Naidu
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on questions relating to the meaning of longing and attention -
On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology
An Onanist's Guide to Loneliness
Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave)
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: Sleepers by Sascha Ende
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3232-sleepersLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
 

The Passing of Autumn

"There's no love like the hour,
and when noise swirls in the world, 
it's the companionship of breath 
which saves souls with its being"
 
We are blessed that seasons - and the seasons of our lives - are marked by the pomp and grace of festivities. We welcome and we let go, we conjoin and we celebrate. And in both the comings and goings, we are left forever changed.
 
What is it about the passages of rituals that we are never left unmoved? As if it is not just Diwali or Id or Christmas, but an important rite of passage, which even if bereft of its symbolism and allegory, becomes the time to come together, to revel in something essential inside us, which often lasts dormant, but finds an awakening and leaves us rejuvenated.
 
But even more than that, these marks in the calendar, these pauses, are rewinds to simpler feelings, as we find meaning in the ‘again’. The times when loved ones got together, to swap tales, to intertwine lives, to revisit old joys - and often festering wounds. It is the time to exchange familiarity and at least THINK of forgiveness as an option, to at least remember that seeking unfiltered joy is nothing but the soul aching for a return to innocence.
 
In the liturgy of our lives, this is the familial moment - private with those who care, festive with those we revel in, revealing with those who are tender with our softest parts, and being a different person to ourselves. More than opening up, we involuntarily crack open.  We are better for just being.
 
And then the aftermath. The unwinding, the closures - and the closing up. As if the festival was an event and not something which changed Iives. Something which we carried as a memory which mixed with other similar memories of revelry and became generic rather than being tagged as the time when we sprouted flowers from the cesspool of our deepest selves. We could well be the goddess left adrift in uncertain currents or a fir tree abandoned in a mothballed  attic till another season.
 
Or we could let the passage of the days go right through us. Without making us feel abandoned as detritus but helping us blunt the shards of our hurts with unquestioning presence.
 
Deep inside, we are ever so often only the hurt child who finds solace in an abandoned church, realising in time, that god also fought battles in the universe, and the church was also his resting place.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hurt and glory of seasons -
• Dancing in the Rains
• Waiting for a Storm
• 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.
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Music: Majestic Autumn by MusicLFiles
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9662-majestic-autumn
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 

Finding Parking Lots (for Love)

The passage of time and the passage of expectations are inversely related. So much of what we hope for slips through the sly slivers of time. What we dreamt of is folded quietly, and put beneath our heads, for us to sleep on in seamless blankness. All exhortations for destinations result only in unspecified directions, and a future rife with its own life. We are rarely given what we desire. But therein lies the universe’s ironic dilemma.
 
Embedded in the mystery of choices, lies one for us. Not chosen for us, but meant for us. Within the dynamic of what we are, what we think, what we feel, there’s a mysterious algorithm which puts our destiny into place. The underwhelming present of choices and our disappointments at how things seem to be turning out is only a question of a passage of time. For later, much later, we look back and see how things really fitted in. Life’s vicissitudes and our fortunes conspire to gift us a life which we can make something of.
 
In our desire to seek parking slots in life, we often forget that first there’s a road to transverse. Someone WILL rashly park where we thought we would back in, but going around the block or parking in a No Parking zone has its frustrations but also its own zen charm or delicious mischief. Once we make the choice, or one is made for us, leave aside parking lots, our need  for cars will disappear by itself. For we would  know  the secret of levitation.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on questions relating to the meaning of love and life -
On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology
Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys
Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave)
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: New Sky by Rafael KruxFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5693-new-skyLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.orchestralis.net/
 

How I Stumbled in My Search for Eternity

What are we if not morsels in this universe searching for meaning? If we are alive to the moment we float through life; if we battle with time to get its predominance, we find passages with hurdles; and if we search and mull and have conversations with life to figure out it’s import, we find false endings.
 
What are we to do if not wrestle with ourselves, to give credence to our struggles?
 
We face life with our hands curled into fists, battle-ready, already battle-weary. We think it is a race to hit the tape, a game of dominance, to be something called the best. We get entangled in trappings and on a daily basis we diminish ourselves in a desperate bid to be a beast.
 
We forget, time and again, that we merely need to be the best of ourselves , to know the best of life. To know generosity, to know giving as the only way to get, to face vicissitudes with the excitement of a scholar discovering new principles.
 
But, over and above everything, to know that in seeking meaning, we give meaning. And nothing, nothing, goes waste. Everything we give of ourselves into the universe has a legacy, the fruits of which we might or might not see in our lifetimes. It could be tangible as art or the written word, or it could be amorphous as a thought, which still gets transmitted to the world in mysterious ways.
 
We are magicians. We should never forget that. But are we the ones who bring awe and wonder into the world or are we evil, using our talent and clout for personal gain which the universe deems as unwieldy and unsustainable. The messaging is clear and unambiguous, it’s we who are arrogant enough to ignore its signs. Untimely sickness, pain, loss. They all find their way into the vacuum which evil leaves. Generosity fills, and there is no space left for anything at all, because happiness is expansive enough to fill the universe.
 
The thunder which reverberates in our skies could bring rain which nourishes our soul further - or it could bring storms which destroy  everything which we built because we’d already destroyed the foundation on which we built our home on.
 
Eternity then is nothing more than the innocence  of our souls and the embracing of the thunder which engulfs our life perforce.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on questions relating to the meaning of life -
Rediscovering Heaven
Yes...
Seasons as Consultants to 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: Relaxation 4 by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9834-relaxation-4License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frank.schroeter.52
 

When I Hear the Whistle of a Passing Train

The passing of a speeding train. It’s whistle from afar. The smoke from the now-disappearing steam engines. The rapidly decreasing chug-chug as it leaves a railway station.
 
These sounds and images are sepia-tinted in my memory, fraying at the ends with passing time. But making me remember - what a time that was. And I drown so heavily in the past, that I wallow and I wonder - is nostalgia a benediction or a curse? Writers extol me - don’t drown in that lake, or your words would forever be cursed by mush and sentimentality. My heart says - linger, a little longer, before climbing the mountain of today.
 
When has a poet ever listened to his head?
I fallow.
 
I sometimes think the wonder which filled our Iives in our childhood had more stars than the skies - the innocence of growing up allowed anything and everything to fill its illimitable space. And as time passed by, the skies drowned in the depth of minutiae’s ocean. Till memories surfaced like flotsam when an ancient breeze came by to ripple the water’s surface. And we asked  ourselves “whither?”
 
Life’s trajectories always seem to take us away. Away from what we love, away from what we cared, away from things which made us the persons we were, away from what we now call ‘our roots’. But by then we are far gone, foregone. We are the rubber band which has been pulled beyond shape. And we look back, stretched and irredeemable, with yearning and regret.
 
I now know what the writers meant - and what they missed.
 
Nostalgia is a country for the tired soul. Its revisitation is not a weakness, because it is primarily a resting place. It is to do with standing at one’s own window, letting either the winter sun in or the falling dusk, and remember what it all meant, at a time when we were not in search of meaning at all. And how those times mean the world to us now. 
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems steeped in nostalgia -
Those Days of a Lost Summer
Lost Atlas of Belonging
One 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.
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Music: The Train in the Darkness by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7240-the-train-in-the-darknessLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
Music: Autumn Dusk by chilledmusicFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9843-autumn-duskLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
 

On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology

We lose out on so much of life because we know lesser and lesser of lucidity. We find knots where none exist. We tie ourselves up when there is nobody out to do it. What is it about the wiring of our brains that we revel in complexity and then dream of a simpler life?
 
It is the nature of the world we live in that pushes us towards choices and then watches in glee as we careen over the cliff. But life is nothing if not of the present and the persistent.
 
As a species we want to hurry - noodles in two minutes, love at first sight. Impossible deadlines and  divorce in a jiffy. Impatient to reach, desperate to get out. We have forgotten to linger, to let things find their own resolutions. We force issues, we lean into people. We seek marathons and then want to run them as 100 metre dashes. And in love?
 
In love we want eternities in our honeymoon, and honeymoons for our lives. There’s nothing which can possibly stop us from the enormity of life being taken as condensed editions of time itself. But the dynamics of the evolution of anything are only revealed to the one who’s patient.
 
Relationships evolve not over days, months or even years, but over lifetimes.
 
Finding familiarity is a function of patient excavation and not a case of fast dating. We need the night, we need the sunbeam, we have to weather the storms and seek shelter in the rain, we have to cook terrible meals and see sublime sunsets, we have to be terrible lovers and caring compatriots, we have to have a difficult child who we raise together to figure the blessing in our lives. The journey has to find the terror of the Tibetan highlands and the grandeur of the New Zealander passes. It has to take in the best and the worst. To find us naked and clothed, to see us alone and with witnesses. And then, and then only, can we say that we’ve found life in all its myriad shades and have known people as the stones or jewels that they truly are.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on life's lucidities -
Flutter
In The Drift We Will Find Our Certainties
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 details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Music: E.C.H.O by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9762-echoLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/
 

Flutter

So much of what we do is a matter of awakenings and slumber. Literally and figuratively, we go to sleep in doubt and awaken with certitudes. But ironically the importance lies in the drift. Because that’s when we are true to ourselves, and not berating the universe for its shingle or rust. The magic is in the moment.
 
To love, to ease into lovemaking and then to sigh into remission, are life’s unasked-for gifts, for us to know that whatever the flutter vicissitudes would bring into our worlds, there is always the concomitant  joy of paradise found. Because there are truths to discover and reconfirm, lies to uncover and not pay attention to, a life to ease oneself into.
 
We are always afraid of the first time. The anticipation ties knots inside and the expectation of disaster shackles our nerves. It’s a worn-out cliche now to talk about finding excitement beyond the pale of risk. In reality, there’s just one moment which could turn our life over. To be present. To be available. To let ourselves be the handmaiden of the moment. We are changed merely because we let ourselves ease through closed doors, with the believe that the arc lights were always ours.
 
As author Anne Lamott says so eloquently - “Grace always meets you exactly where you are, but does not leave you where it found you.”
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joys and exasperations of lovemaking -
Finding Souls Between their Legs
Why Don't You Make Love To Me Anymore
Bringing The Storm Home
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: Imagefilm 015 by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/296-imagefilm-015License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
Music: Heart Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 
 

Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys

A marriage is already beset with contrariness in its very idea. They say, anthropologically, a marriage is against man’s overriding instinct to rampantly spread his seed, to ensure progeny from someone at least. Nature-wise, it goes against the principle of seeking fulfilment, because one person can rarely, if ever, fulfil the myriad parts of a person's needs. I can be gregarious but end up with a self effacing private wife. I’m bursting with the need to reach out, talk, swap tales and have a drunken Saturday night but end up with a husband who only wants to watch sports on tv. I might be spiritual in an unending search, and be with a wife in need of unending conversations.
 
And that’s when we start aching with the gaps inside. Of feeling life out as a ragtag enterprise with little redemption. One damning relationship is an irredeemable scar sometimes. And solutions are invariably forked.
 
Friendships made as an individual and not a couple or falling in love with another whilst married, are often two sides to a hard line - one side is sexless, another is not. For embedded in the institution of marriage are trust, hurt and jealousy. And none of these can be easily brushed off. As it often determines what can be embraced and what cannot.
 
It is easy to find reconciliations and touch points of comfort as one ages, if a couple has survived the vicissitudes and the incessant rambling of youth, because reaching a plateau of acceptability is itself an arduous task. But there is a stillness to be got, and a distillation of instincts which emerges as one grows old. For our needs, which have wild compasses in youth, finally find a North Star as age and time catch up.
 
After shrugging off the hunger for variety and the search for the verity, there’s a plateau a person reaches, distilled of distraction, a clear distillate of failed attempts, derived realisations and evolved priorities. We are finally reconciled. And know what’s important. Maybe it’s after having all experiences, that we are able to denounce some, maybe it’s after burning our relationships to near charred state that we realise what is most important.
 
But irrespective of the genesis being hypocrisy or awakement, there is a peace which emerges. Of knowing that what ensues is distraction-less, of knowing that like so much else, life is also an emblem of perception, perjury, preparation and peace. We complicate things needlessly when we have the strength to realise and redeem, we search for the new when our curiosity burns like the Northern Lights, we are ready to commit to the foolish when we have the time to live out its fallouts. But it all passes.
 
Marriage, which we enter sometimes duty-bound, sometimes as a mistaken culmination to love, is itself a complexity. But if we emerge from its initial skirmishes and subsequent battlefields, without fallen bodies and fatal injuries, we will find beauty embedded in its gashes and scars. Like so much else, two people together are a lesson in finding zen in unwashed dishes whilst standing on the corpses of past selves, smiling into the joint journey of survival. 
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joy and challenges of marriage -
Love's Night of the Long Knives
Extraordinary Life
Why Don't You Make Love to Me Anymore
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: Epic Intro 2017 by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/558-epic-intro-2017License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
 Music: Die Unendliche Geschichte by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/512-die-unendliche-geschichteLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
 
 

For Anyone Who Bleeds

These past few days, I’m thinking a lot about the reality of a nation, and time and again I’m coming back to the idea of a nation. I talk to people who love this country - possibly can die for it - but when questioned about the state of the nation, are either heartbroken, broken, or ready to break something.
 
There’s an atlas of indignation inside them and they follow its contours whenever the country is discussed. The atlas has only troughs and heights. But the tops are reached with difficulty and rarely, and they languish in the valley of their anger and despair. They conceive of the entirety of a nation’s complexity in a few algorithms of politics and society. Their mood is driven by the headlines, and the headlines are driven by the nature of the publication they read, and the publications are driven by what is most sensational on the day.
 
Regardless, our hearts are broken every morning.
 
Even as we breathe it’s air, and hum it’s tunes, even as we transverse the streets which we love as our own back door, and spend an evening with those who give meaning to our existence, we focus on our idea of what we think is happening to the country and hate half its politicians , and more debilitatingly, half its people.
 
Who are we judge? Who are we to judge people? Anyone as deeply flawed as we are, anyone with the prejudices we carry inside of us, is in no position to cast aside the belief systems of the other half. For in doing so, we are compromising the diversity of thoughts and beliefs of a mass of our brethren, we are rejecting them not for their humanity or generosity but because of what they believe in politically.
 
There are some wrongs, which are in the realm of black and white. But others are our ideas of situations and people. Nothing more nothing less. All we need is a quietude and a question, to reach out, to reach in. And then to walk side by side, comfortable in the knowledge that we both believe what we do, and are still terrific people to know.
 
The day we find our bridges over our most deep-seated resentments, we are on the way towards finding our nation’s true DNA and not get lost in our idea of what it is.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the triumph & tragedies of a nation:
Blood & Light in the War Zone
Sounds of Living & The Dead
Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh
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: Gracias by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/260-graciasLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
Music: Farm [full version] by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8206-farm-full-versionLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/
 

Windblown Om

Mornings are strange places. They are an urging, a calling, a welcoming. But often they are a desperation, a question, a challenge. We define it, the way we lean into it. But by its mere presence, it provides space to our lives.
 
If we seek to be presences, knowing how to let the universe pass through us such that we can be witnesses to our own lives and to the world, we can let the morning be a blessing. But if we seek to fight battles with its incessant periodicity, cursing it for its quotidian challenge and insistences, then we move into a war zone, battling  the spear of our despairing hope with our armour of resistance.
 
In a mentality which sees change as a needless challenge, each day is a burden to be carried through. We often wake up with either the hauntings of the night or with the dread of having an endless day.       
 
But. If you flip a switch inside and see the abundance being laid out for us, daily, day in day out, our lives suddenly fill up with an aching extravaganza. The question then is - how NOT to waste this blessing.
 
What we really need to do is to lean into the morning with a mind clear of of everything. We just need to listen to the morning sounds, just see it’s colours, run our fingers through its textures. We just need to let the universe frame our questions and give us the answers.
 
When we let the world carry our burden for us, then mornings are a prayer and the day a benediction.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the magic of mornings
Lovers in the Morning
Sipping Tea in a Rumi Morning
Mother's Rambling Lessons on Life Imparted in Morning Walks
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: Cruising (Romeos Erbe) by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3140-cruising-romeos-erbeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
Music: Season One Intro by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/254-season-one-introLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de