Uncut Poetry

In the Darkness of Our Autobiographies

We are often our own worst enemies. One mistake, one misdemeanor, and we hang ourselves before the world does. We deflate ourselves, we berate ourselves, we compare and invariably find ourselves falling short. Why? How can many of us find nothing right in ourselves whereas there are people in the world who can find nothing wrong in themselves! And in this game of self-obsession, where people are either the best or the worst, we bring into each situation not a recognition of its zen but our own stunted self-perception.
 
Dynamics of action are then driven not situationally - what the time and happenstance demands - but what the person wants. It’s a difference which makes the dynamics of results uneven and unpredictable. And each one of us more prone to our own vulnerabilities, and the situation to collapse within the black holes of our personalities.
 
But that’s the truth of us and what we touch. We can only be a sum  of our heights and recesses, the obsessions of our successes and the forceful blackouts of our failures. And we wish to revisit the glory of the same path for every endeavor and invariably encounter the pitfalls of commonality.
 
Darknesses are then an accumulation of too many bright spots.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk about self-discovery -  
Midas Touches Himself
Who Do You Choose to Become When Alone
I Am a Residue of Life
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Betelgeuse by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5780-betelgeuseLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Lose a Lover Not a Friend

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:Unconsumated, 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
 

Sounds of Living and the Dead

Do human beings only want graveyards on the face of this beautiful earth? With just about any reason to justify it. It could be religion, geopolitics, hegemony, hubris, world domination, strategy, business. Even if it entails sacrificing a whole populace, a country, people? Render devastation, and look at the lurid satellite images and say “It’s a small price to pay.” And if it’s a difference in colour of the skin - it’s no price at all. And if it’s someone who takes the name of a god you don't believe in? Huh, why ask? If it’s the west, the reason is commerce and supremacy; if it’s central, it is religion and angst; if it’s east, it’s an ancient philosophy of power; if it’s the far east, it’s simply a place in the sun; If it’s up north, it’s what you do to keep one’s power circle intact.
 
There are as many reasons to kill as there are people. We, the ultra-ordinary are the simpletons, crying over poetry for the right reason, directing our angst in erroneous directions.
 
At every point in our lives we are dispensable, our nullification rendering not even a murmur beyond the next spring. 
 
All we can hope to do is to seal our ears and turn to the ones we love the most, and bless ourselves with the air and the light and drifting leaves and shifting seasons and find our joy. Everything can be, and is, vapour. We should walk our hard ground till it lasts.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which are steeped with anguish  -
Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh 
The Final Goodbye (or Why Lovers Decide to Die Together) 
The Power of No 
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my 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

Midas Touches Himself

"... freedom is never wrested away,
it is forever a choice which we just gift away."
 
The tragedy of the modern day work place is its uncanny ability to numb souls. Oh jobs give purpose, direction, sustenance. But the price to be paid is often exacting. It’s a dichotomous entity - both a portal to freedom and an entrapment, a privilege of accomplishment and a secret that erodes, a means to stability and an illusion of permanence, the shimmer of independence and the reality of a cul-de-sac. There is so much which we demand of a job forgetting that it demands equally of us.  There is no free ride in this world and the money, perks, and position which are required to put one’s body and soul together in fact delinks the body from the soul.
 
What is this dichotomy, this  reality of heights attached with acrophobia? What is this desperate need for power and privilege and the inability to hold on to the spoils? The desperate cry to be held when the heights bring  distance without the insight,  when the hunger to be understood often leads to a life full of hiatuses. 
 
What are we if not beings subsumed in the search for meaning? To earn is often the mistaken first step to fullness, without knowing that it is also the first step away from fulfilment. What is it about the modern work place that it erodes our souls so? That embedded within its necessities is the entire armament of destruction. It is so easy to live wrapped up in the beatific illusion of privilege with all its accruements, when the very marrow  of our souls has been exacted as it’s price.
 
We often don’t even know what we’ve become. On the wings of accolades, we mistake living for life. Are we fools to be fooled or we know no other way to approach life than what we’ve been trained to do? We are often no more than what our jobs demand and give. The fog inside us grows so thick that we don’t recognize our own charred selves, as we put ourselves on a mantel covered in gold and silver. We are our very own Midas.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of sublimity and improbabilities  -
The Improbability of Wishes 
When the Goddesses Depart  
The Sublime in the Ordinary 
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my 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

Uncut Poetry Salon featuring Soul Poets Kashiana & Indran

You have to hear Kashiana speak about the sensuousness of bitter gourd curry or the Zen of belonging,  to understand the delicate relationship she has with words and how she captures the fragility of beauty. As a counterpoint we have Indran, with his muscular poetry which combines indignation, despair and angst into a poetic tapestry of aching pulchritude. 
 
Both Kashiana and Indran are terrific poets based out of USA, and came together for a lovely chat with Uncut Poetry on their new poetry books. They spoke about the genesis of their poetic journeys, of memory, of displacement, of processes, and why diaspora poets possibly have a more universal view of the countries they settle in.
 
Kashiana Singh is from India, lives in North Carolina and embodies her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her everyday. She is a management professional by definition but a poet practitioner by personal preference. She proudly serves as Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her poems can be found on Rattle, Poets Reading the News, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus, amongst others. Kashiana says that she carries all her geographical homes within her poetry.
 
Her first two books were Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words and Crushed Anthills. Woman by the Door is her latest collection of poetry.
 
Poet Usha Akella says this of her book - "Singh’s poetry universe is one of hidden corners, apertures of light, and the liminality of experience verbing into memory. A poetry replete with metaphors of passageways and openings, personal myth making is alchemized from the pixels of memories to define what it is to be woman in this world."
 
Get Woman by the Door here - https://linktr.ee/kashianasingh
 
Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant. Also recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube. He also publishes poetry under the name Beltway Editions(www.beltwayeditions.com) and their first published book is "Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air", which is an anthology of poems by six Muslim women poets who wrote together at M.I.T.
 
Get Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant here - https://www.broadstonebooks.com
 
If you liked this interview, consider listening to these wonderful poets speaking about their poetry, life and times -
Poetry Busker Ryan Tomlin
African American Poet Katerina Canyon
 
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Rustic Ballad by Alexander NakaradaLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/4720-rustic-balladLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A Summery Love Story (in the middle of winter)

And then she falls in love with a girl.
 
She reads about it and she discovers she is ‘queer’, which is odd, because she feels normal, in fact is feeling as normal as is possible. The excitement she feels to be in the company of the girl she is falling in love with is as natural as possible. Everything about her is magical, her laughter, her hair, the intensity of her eyes as she listens to her, the excitement with which she looks at her when she goes near her, her stories and the way her eyes fill up. And her abandon.
 
What was odd about it?
 
What is odd about falling in love with all of that? Just because somebody sometime, some law somewhere, decided what is natural and what is not - here she was feeling odd, god forbid, feeling guilty.
 
As if there was a wrong being committed, as if some law of nature was being broken, as if she was, without doing a thing, but just for feeling a feeling, was bring prosecuted and standing guilty. If love itself was not overwhelming as a feeling, here was a world calling this feeling - queer!! What was she to do with this conflict, this battle of her feelings and what the world felt about it. How she was being judged without even opening her mouth about something so …pure, so special, so transcendental. How could something which seemed to have been ordered in heaven and ordained by the gods themselves be wrong, be bad.
 
She was all of 15 years old, and here she was - feeling the worst at this best time of her life.
 
Alas.   
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of love breaking barriers -
Lovers of Broken Mountains
Call Me By Your Name 
I Surrender to That Feeling Again
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Betonwaldromantik by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/374-betonwaldromantikLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Finally Home

The concept of home is such a simple complexity. Is it a presence, a search, a destination, a desire, a lover or a DIY?
 
Are it's contours predetermined, a work-in-progress, a shallow end of the pool or the deepest part of the ocean?
 
It it a place to rest before the next bout of restlessness or is it the place to determine destinations?
 
How does its being get significance - by a mere return every evening or a filling of space or a collection of accoutrements? 
 
Does it come with a character predetermined or is it a mere reflection of what makes the universe inside us?
 
Do adventures end in a home? Do they get beget here? Do they find their demise, their resurrection, their meaning and their scripting here? Or is it a mere cemetery, where everything is laid to rest, albeit with tenderness?
 
What is a home? Do we require it only for replenishment and shelter? Or is it something which is a part of what we are , and in turn makes us what we are?
 
What is home?
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the warmth of a home -
A Home as An Open Dream
The Door is Unlocked. I am Awake
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
BRIO 1 by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/232-brio-1License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy

I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy*
 * From a line in the BBC serial "Vigil"
 
 
"There are always some bits of light
for both of us to take away,
but you do want the entire buffet of effulgence."
 
Time and again relationships slip into presuppositions - and we start taking the ones who are closest to us for granted. We find our own needs overriding our sensitivity to the soul-twitches and mood-swingers of our loved one's aching hearts. So much of what is good in us is drowned in the morass of the quotidian. We deflect, we ignore, we stop noticing, we stop holding, hugging, caring. All that matters is our anguish, our petulance, our paraphernalia.
 
We are lost in our own contracted world.
 
And the ones we ignore because of our self-obsession, quietly suffer on the fringes. We fret and we wonder what went wrong. Till the realisation sinks in that though we profess to love somebody, we are only in love with ourselves.
 
We then realize that much of life’s meaning, and often our own worth, is derived from others. We understand ourselves better, through the wisdom of others, our arrogance is softened when we encounter the simplicity of the truly wise. We are overwhelmed with light when we crack the hard exterior of our self-centeredness.
 
When we draw people we profess to love towards ourselves, only when our lives are buffeted by freezing  winds, or when we realise that the world's adulation is a fickle being, we stand the danger of being rebuffed in turn. Nothing is static in the universe, not even love. And as we pass from one mirror to another, we finally come to the one which is cracked. And in the tragedy of this realisation lies the irrevocability of love which has now given up.
 
Churn always brings change, and the power of the anguished ‘no more’ has reverberations  which can shake our universe.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the strains in relationships -
On Breaking up (Without Breaking)
Love's Night of the Long Knives
How to Hold Love as it Breaks
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Mandela by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/209-mandelaLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Atomic by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/119-atomicLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
 

New York: Concurrently Schizophrenic.

Whenever I travel to USA, wherever I might be, I try to come back through New York. It is a magnet to my senses. I could stand for hours in its art galleries, but also days on its streets. Sometimes as an onlooker, sometimes as a part of its unending swirl. The city's smoke and movement, it's glittering heights and its grimy innards, its populace with purpose, the hopelessness of its hobos. Its glass, its ostentation, its purpose, its hope, its possibilities. The way the city assimilates me into its poetry, the way its hardness empties me and its art fills me, New York is a sensory overload.
 
And it changes hues, borough to borough, bridge to bridge, suburb to suburb. And as I travel, I am filled with the confusion of the person who wants to pin down a city into a pithy phrase. For within this one city lie a hundred possible faces. The arty, the grimy, the soaring, the sparing, the vulgar, the simple. And the definitions come as a smorgasbord of meanings and possibilities. The way we are, the way all of us are - never one, always multidimensional, always a contributor, always a purveyor. Often a victim, often a voyeur, often a little bright, ever so often unmitigatingly sad. New York, concurrently schizophrenic, indeed.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems with a city as it backdrop -
Calcutta - a Lover's Epitaph
Searching for Coffee in Jaipur
Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Nu Jazz Lounge Vol 2 (Mondtanz Edit) by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/141-nu-jazz-lounge-vol-2-mondtanz-edit-License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Capturing the Feeling

"...the cold's mood would be agreeable
as it opened its vulnerabilities to the warmth,
and she would lay in it,
like a cat in nirvana,
and I would be beside her,
looking at her,
knowing her presence, her silence,
as just persuasions for me to be with her."
 
We often forget people, we forget their faces. We forget the cut of his jaw, or the slope of her breast. We forget the texture of her hand as it held ours, the pucker of her nose as she laughed, we forget the galaxy of freckles on his back, or how her skin folded next to her thighs. Time robs so much away, often with heartbreak, often as a healer.
 
But what we don't forget about people is how they make us feel.
 
The warmth she spread with that laugh, the quiet recognition of worth he gave with his being, the comfort in her steady voice as the world crashed around, the definition of value embedded in the aromas of his kitchen, the magnetic charm of her mind as she spoke of a book, the serenity found on her breast after a long day of sighs.
 
Life's trajectory is determined not by the events or the crisis or the highs of happenstances - these are a given, a must, if you live life long enough. A person's memory, her longevity in our blood, the persistence of his lingering trace, are all factors of what we know about ourselves whenever we were with them. The legacy of people is less a cumulation of our experiences with them, and more a residue of their dust and stardust. 
 
The tactility of memory is an algorithm of the pleasure, hurt, ache, tenderness, ruin, cheer, kindness, bruising, which life's trajectory leaves in its wake as remembrance. The true worth of life is in what it makes us feel. The true worth of people is what they make us feel.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beatific beauty of the sun -
The Slant of the Winter Sun
In the Softest Sunshine of Winter
Lovers in the Morning
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
The Way To Kataka by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/11-the-way-to-katakaLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license