Uncut Poetry

Let Everything Else Be, Let It Be

The what-ifs of life are a perennial enigma, a source of continual fascination.
 
What touches us does change us, what passes by always leaves it’s fragrance. The possibility of the butterfly effect - where everything changes at the flutter of a butterfly’s wings - and the intrigue of the sliding doors - what if the metro you were running for slides shut just when you got to it. Would your life be different if you’d reached a destination earlier? What if the delay caused made you to meet someone you connected at an immediate subliminal level?
 
Everything is speculation - but everything ELSE looks so much more promising and enticing.
 
Our choices, governed ostensibly by our thinking, are often themselves progeny of chance. I remember Tom Tykwer’s immensely philosophical and fascinating Run Lola Run, where Lola’s minutest action changed her fortune and those of everyone her life touched.
 
So is there a lesson in all of this for us? For love? For life? Possibly there is. Does it seem to say that life is not in the passive acceptance of what destiny throws at us, as if it’s an inevitability, but in an intense striving which then results in inevitabilities. For then it is time to be at peace  with what one gets.
 
But much more than anything in our lives, the thing which is most difficult to accept is to know when to stop spinning and to stop and gaze at the beauty of bustling flowers. And to fall in love with what one inevitably  has.
 
The adequacy of love is a perpetual quibble. There is nothing which satiates. Everything is an imbalance, everything is a quest. We mourn the absences in the person deigned for us. We hate the design of our fortune which keeps us out of introductions and  charmed circles. Within that disfigured womb of our expectations, we have to work out the contours of beauty if we have to maintain our sanity and find the stunning fulfilment which minutiae could confer, if only we had the eyes to see it. 
 
We would then be new people, happy to say - let everything be, let it be.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on love's rocky terrain -
Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave)
He Made Lasagna Before He Left
The Final Goodbye (Or Why Lovers Decide To Die Together)
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 -
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
Mellow Sweet Traditional Piano by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8885-mellow-sweet-traditional-pianoLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 Sad Cinematic Background by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9230-sad-cinematic-backgroundLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 

When Breath Becomes Air

"I muse often of his being and his departure,
missing the softness of his glance.
He’d looked at me with happiness,
as if my presence itself
was good news."
 
So much about life is to know about death. In its very concept lies life’s only immutable truth.
 
As our days drift into countable numbers, we can either lean into the reality and wait, or fight the Dylanian battle of “not going gentle into the dark night”. But ever so often, there is no option. We become fortune’s arbitrary choice. We can only hope for painless exits. But regardless of what happens to us, death leaves behind a form of spiritual debris - the ones who loved both our silence and our chaos.
 
What is it, to be still alive when someone you love no longer is? What are the stories which now remain silenced? What are the changes we would have wrought in each other’s lives? Because relationships are forever budding, always a passage to something new, always gravitating to the other with new cells, if not new eyes.
 
So much of what we lose, when someone dies, has to do with things we were not always aware we cared for. The loss is greater for that late realisation.
 
So it comes back to our present with the ones we love. The only thing we can give - or receive - is companionship, presence.
 
On Sundays, as I sit at my desk, finishing my editing or writing my newsletter, I see my dad silently stand at the door and look at me. When I catch his glance, he smiles happily, and walks back to his room.
 
As our needs leave the bastion of greed, our simplest desires are enough for a comfortable easement into serenity. The ticking bomb of our mind finally finds a resting place
 
There’s something to be said about easing into death with equanimity. Everything falls by the wayside, only space and light remain. And in that peace, even the people we leave behind find their reconciliations. The drift stops. The breath which ceases  finds a new breath to breathe. Life finds fresh renewals. Death finds a new life.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on being alive to death  -
What Do I Leave Behind
An Epitaph Made of Light & Air
I Love You
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: Lonesome by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/51-lonesomeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
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
 
 

One Morning, The Ants

I like people who do their own thing. The youngest of the young, the maddest of the mad,  the dreamer in the group who gets ribbed, the one with the wildest theories, the one who always has the last laugh.
 
I love the ultra sensitive. The one whose heart breaks when she inadvertently steps on a tiny monsoon snail, the one who gets lost on the way to familiar destinations, the one who picks only fallen flowers for prayer, the child who goes into the meadow on the way to school.
 
These people are made of glass and heart, the strongest fibre and the most breakable material. Because all such people go against the grain, against the accepted, against the norm. And that is what makes them precious and dangerous and endangered. For to be different, is not to be of this firmament, is to think radically, and know the secret rules of flying. Such people are one with another realm. Such people need to be held close and, paradoxically, to be given their space - so they know their genius is not scorned into ash, or hastened into oblivion.
 
If as people we have to have inspiration, if as civilization we have to have radical minds, if as the human race, we need to figure out the unfathomable, these are the flames which need the cupped hands of all humanity to save them from extinguishment.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on being alive to life  -
The Sublime in The Ordinary 
Extraordinary Life
Mother's Rambling Lessons Imparted in Morning Walks in My Childhood
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 following music was used for this media project:Music: Lonesome by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/51-lonesomeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
 

Favourite People (Who We Love And Leave)

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
 

Dancing In The Rains

"I can see the wind pick up it’s pace.
The skies have turned moody again.
Will it be a blizzard, she piped in her little voice
holding tightly to my hand, lest I be blown away."
 
In life we are both the flow and the stock. The flight and the roots. Logical and unhinged. Reasonable and petulant. Generous and anarchic. We are all this, we are all this together. Often in seriatim, more often overlapping.
 
When a child quizzes us on the ironies of nature or the dualities of the universe, we realise how much of a paradoxical concoction we are. And not only do we hold these contrasts within us, we also get by with a balancing act. We are a miracle, of dreaming of rootlessness while working hard to be rooted. We sometimes fail ourselves by swinging one way or the other. But if we’ve nurtured ourselves well, we would not let strong winds blow us away, and still get to enjoy their breeziness in our hair.
 
A tree is an easy analogy.
 
But how do you explain to a child that if the tree doesn’t let it’s fruit fall or let go of the pollen in its flower, it will not spread out its goodness. That sowing your wild oats, with all its negative connotations, is also the way to expand your world. That being rootedness is a virtue but it should not translate as being stuck in the mud. That a mind has to be open and free, to let the winds from all directions to flow in, and out, and to take one to mysterious places.
 
Because the roots have to be inside, to be the  gyroscope when the compass goes wild, like the metal spine of a roller coaster which can throw you in all directions but will never let you fly wildly in thin air.
 
To be steady is an art, but to fly is the only way to grow.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on rains & storms -
Bringing The Storm Home
Waiting For A Storm
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: Flight Pack 1 - 4/6 (Segeln) by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/179-flight-pack-1-46-segelnLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
 
Music: Childhood by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/448-childhoodLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de

And She Waited For My Call

"I have woken nights thinking of her
and then turned into myself
to dream other things.
She’s in my mind
but like shifting sands."
 
'Belonging' is a word which fills us up. It gives agency to us, a sense of community. We feel attached to kindred souls.
 
It could be with people who we connect with because of a commonality of interests or service, in which case we would be driftwood, sailing where our proclivities take us. Or we could belong to a family, which gives our heart a hearth, and our souls a conviction of acceptance. This is where we return even after misbehaviour, where our warts are not necessarily ignored, but are not put up as premier exhibits.
 
But the belonging to a heart is different than anything else. Because, more than acceptance, there is a sense of fusion. Where the veins and arteries connect inextricably, in ways that, after a while, one cannot make out the beginnings or the ends. Partners, spouses, lovers, friends - they are worlds, but who individually are separate universes of meaning and worth.
 
They are the ones who go beyond being caregivers - they are crucibles.
 
Because in that melting-pot, our miscibility is such that though our life’s rhythms might not be determined by them, our inner worlds are. In infinitesimal ways, we change with each other, we change for each other. Until we overlap such that we rejoice and give hurt and take injuries such that when we bleed, we find the blood coming out from the other’s pores.
 
We bloom together and we disintegrate together. We are both the flower and the dust.
 
No. We are not permanent. Nothing in this ageless firmament is. But we are the best till we last. When we belong to a heart, we ironically our our best self, even as we subsume our identity and dignity - and are blissful. It is not a euphoric state, but one where our sense of the moment and the truth of evanescence is enhanced by its incomparable and enduring beauty.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on distances -
On Breaking Up (Without Breaking)
Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye
Departures
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: 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
 

Difficult Child

"And then I tell myself -
he didn’t ask to be here."
 
An obedient  son is an oxymoron. Each one of us has rebelled in our own ways in our youth, and have generally not been worse for it (though who’s to say?!). But each story has its  variations. And parents have their own tales to tell. And as one myself, I have my tales - and travails!
 
A life is a gift in so many ways. And much more when you see the gifts which come unasked for. And the giving to one’s child has a tender inevitability to it, which makes it both a duty as also an unburdening - it’s a relief to be able to pass on what one has garnered in one’s life, for the simple alternative is to take it with oneself to one’s grave.
 
But the corollary which haunts is - why is this passage of rites so fraught?
 
But then I realise that I generalise, and there are so many imperceptible ways children learn - direct, osmosis, eavesdropping, whilst rebelling, whilst being rejected, when pushed away, when held close irrespective. Our relationship to our children is a lifelong work-in-progress, till the time (and even whilst) they start to tell us what to do.
 
Because there are no templates for care.
 
And then we understand the irony that we learn more as we seek to teach. And in that one realisation lies the light which then shines equally on both of us.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on children -
Daughters Who Don't Listen (and other ways to be brave)
Kripa (a blessing from a daughter)
My Little Zen Warrior
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 -
End Of Summer by Frank SchröterLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/6633-end-of-summerLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The Things We Become When We Leave

"I have gone, love,
now let me go."
 
We are all changeable creatures. 50 billion of our cells die every day, physically we are not the same today as we were yesterday. And that irrefutable truth seeps into the very core of our beings. Every day, we change as persons too - imperceptibly, almost surreptitiously: the people we meet, the experiences we stumble into, what our senses see, what scares  our heart. If our beings revel in the scars and bleed in the unexpected, we are already what we were not.
 
And we start looking at everything and everyone with new eyes.
 
And often the direction of our life changes, the people we thought were inseparable to the importance of our lives, now look like milestones - without the love dimming, without the care diminishing, we know we have different directions to take. And we drift.
 
We do not break off relationships only out of bitterness or regret. Sometimes we also recognise that we have moved on, and moved in different directions. And we know it’s time to part, and we know the hurt we will leave behind. We know explanations might sound lame, and to say “I love you” whilst leaving, is contrarian and often unexplainable.
 
But our heart knows the truth - it often says that there are bigger issues than love, when our very existence is at stake, when the space we need to find for ourselves needs to be unencumbered, when what we stand for or seek, needs solitude because we’ve already crowded it with personalities and our own personas which require either recognition or elimination.
 
We do not leave anybody - we are only in search of a new self. And to find a new nook which says -“Stay”.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on departures -
That Gorgeous Evening When You Left
Departures
Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye
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 -
Evacuation by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/8118-evacuationLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

An Onanist’s Guide to Loneliness

"Someone brought wild flowers home,
and their pungent sweetness was a trauma
and I walked naked in the house, till I threw
them into a bin with three Hail Mary’s."
 
Self-gratification is a lonely enterprise packed with people. It is our encounter with fantasies but starts with a conversation with our loneliness.
 
We are often left alone, or are merely alone. While the world celebrates together, we are left with an aching need to connect.  In reaching out, we reach in; in finding purpose we find pudenda; while banishing wayward thoughts we find the wilderness of brambles.
 
There are ways to be, and be with, our best selves. As we explore our minds with books, or extrapolate our feelings to film characters, or discover levitation with music. But when we want everything together, bunched together with a promise of iridescent colours, where our agonies sing, where our driest lands grow moist enough for spring, when we know we have visitation rights to heaven - that’s when we choose ourselves over others.
 
To say it’s pleasure on tap or bliss in passing is to miss the point. The enormity of an intimate relationship with ourselves just cannot ever be undermined. For those short moments of ecstasy make us forget - however briefly - the extremity of the barrenness which invariably is the bane of our lives.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on intimacies -
Perils of Breakup Sex (Or Why I Can't Keep My Legs Closed For You)
Map My Body, Lover
Finding Souls Between Their Legs
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 -
Dragonsong by Alexander NakaradaLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/9301-dragonsongLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ouroboros by Alexander NakaradaLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/9370-ouroborosLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A Garden of Departures

"The thorns sting, my palms bleed,
the blood stains the acquiescent leaves,
the morning breeze passes by, whispers -
don’t hold on to anything so tight."
 
I walk every morning on this walking path in the gated community I stay in. It’s an arboretum of colours and aromas. But much more than that, it is a passage of evanescence and disappearances. That gorgeous gladiola? Won’t be there the day after. The blazing gulmohur - here only for the summer. The yellow chandelier blossom - too fragile to even last a storm. The fragrant jasmine - empty after giving the entirety of its cachet of scent. The yellow-breasted frangipani? Hardy to look, easy to fall.
 
Everyday I see the shapes - bells and funnels,  flutes and trumpets, cups and hearts, bowls and spheres     - and I see their glory and their fall. I see how they find meaning in their being, an elegance in their stature - and a quietude in their demise. Their existence itself is drama - they don’t need to do anything to draw attention to themselves. They are touched by the eye which seeks pleasure - hidden or visible, they throw the same aroma, and preen quietly within their deep-seated beauty.
 
For me, every walk has meaning - a revelation, a realization, a reaffirmation. I learn - to pass by rather than hold on, love passionately but know the truth of passages, live every stage and love the demise, there’s beauty in the withering just as there’s tragedy in the beauty.
 
I come back from every walk alive to life because I have experienced the truth of departures.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the evanescent -
Distances (Kaifi Azmi ke liye)
Stories Which Survive
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 details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Sunset Fields by Alexander NakaradaLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/7979-sunset-fieldsLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license