Uncut Poetry

When Words Despair For Stories

Can you believe the fact that there are people who go out for a full day and come back home and say there’s no story to tell, no incident to narrate, nothing magical to report. Of course, there is. It’s just that they do not wish to share. It could be disinclination, it could be the hangover of a recrimination, it could be tiredness.
 
After a full day of words, maybe all one seeks at the end is a spot of silence.
 
That it has to be the time when your closest and most loved ones are there is a misfortune. Here they are, home bound, captive to a routine, grinding the relentless machinery of a home, and here you are wanting nothing but a time to yourself, after mortgaging your time, soul and throat in the service of someone who has bought your life out by providing you a livelihood.
 
And then there’s the contrarian tragedy.
 
The day is often a pressure cooker because you have not been able to say what you wanted or fought your battles the way you might have wanted to. And when you are finally in your safe zone, you burst out. Irresponsibly, with limitless capacity to let go. And everything goes still. Hurt. There was no battle and everyone stands bruised. Because words have an unparalleled capacity to tear the untearable, split armours, break hearts.  And as human beings we are masters at destroying.
 
I have often mused on this almost unseemly power of words. They are mere wisps, created just there and then, like smoke, like breath, they are just a combination of syllables and vowels and abbreviations and intonations, things which have no stinger to sting or teeth to bite or touch for tenderness built into them, and they still have this illimitable capacity to comprehensively change everything around.
 
It’s so easy to say - it’s just words. But it’s never ‘just’ words. It’s like breath from inside, an amalgam of our feeling, desire, anger, passion which alchemises into something heated, cool or plain. Words are never words, they are our footprint on the soul of the one who listens or reads us. It is our foray into the heart and body and soul of people who care to bother with them. Even strangers are not immune to their power.
 
Other people’s words are important for us because we internalise what others say. We take words spoken to us as opinions about us. Breath transmutes into life. The power of words can make. Words can also break.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on tiredness   -
Let Life Break Your Heart
Who Do You Choose To Become When Alone
An Onanist's Guide to Loneliness
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: Emotions 2 by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10547-emotions-2License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Music: Violet Sky by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10591-violet-skyLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
 

Gather Me

One of my life’s ongoing struggles has been not to let myself dissipate such that little of me remains for me to enjoy myself. Even worse, as the pieces  which the world loves of me gets grabbed, and I stand helplessly as a bystander seeing the world take its fill, and I know myself as empty, not even sure if I remain with my heart intact.
 
Worse - we become strangers inside, trying to keep up with life’s vicissitudes and changes. And then there is a moment when we see our face in the mirror and realise - we know the lines but not the person within those lines.
 
As life and people make their demands on us, it is upto us to see what part of our being and our time do we let go. For within the complexity of life lies the opportunity to find the simple ways of finding our own core. It could be with realisation, it could be with the love of someone close.
 
So much of our lives is a litany of breaking ourselves up for the world and then putting the broken pieces together for ourselves. We are lost children and found souls. In our brokenness we seek someone or someway to complete ourselves and instead gravitate to what’s also injured.
 
So much of our lives is spent in reclaiming ourselves in ways beyond what we do, what the world sees us do, because this is mere mist behind which lies a person desperate to know herself. I have spent nights struggling to see myself beyond what I write, what I think, what I do. And I have asked myself if this is what I am, my definition, or am I someone beyond, something else? Who is the true person? Behind my laughter and irritations and gifts and words, what really defines me? And how do I even get to know that person?
 
Because my thoughts are the offspring of the moment, my feelings are born of wounds. Are adjectives my true self? He’s kind, they say, he’s talented, funny, considerate, loving, insightful, but I know I’m also irascible, hard-headed, self-centered, and blunt. What defines me then? Who am I?
 
I know when I look at some people in my life, I know that beyond their proclivities and demands, they are often someone else - innocent to a fault, emotionally rich beyond age. And I love them for that intangible quality which they never overtly display but which I know defines them for me.
 
What am I to such people? What is that essence beyond talent and my nature, that core which says - THIS is what you truly are, when I think of you beyond everything else.
 
I will sit down today and gather every little piece I can think of me - try to put them together and then look behind them to see - if there is someone or something beyond which exists - something which I can say is truly me.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on people struggling with themselves   -
Dysfunctional Familes (and other joys)
On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology
How I Stumbled In My Search For Eternity
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: Heaven's Gate by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gateLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

For The One Who Found Her Silence

How can we ever be prepared for the inevitabilities of loved ones? Our being mortal, our knowing of it, and our facing up to its ascendancy, are all different dynamics. We are never spared it’s agony, it’s feeling of leaving us bereft. As if the death of a loved one was a conspiracy against us, a punishment, maybe, of not paying enough attention to them, of taking them for granted, of giving precedence to the insubstantial over the precious.
 
The amalgam of grief and guilt breaks us, often irretrievably. Often in lethal ways.
 
As news breaks, of an immutable illness, an irreversible ailment, we are suddenly face-to-face with the cruelty of time’s progress. Because when we calculate the number of hours we actually have with them, after deducting all that we spend in our other necessary or trivial pursuits, the number which emerges is small, infinitesimally small. And we panic.
 
And with thudding realisation we try to put a cessation to our small meannesses, the tragedy of picking fights on insignificant slights, of carrying scratches as wounds, of mistaking carelessness as intent.
 
The compendium of love is a checkered compilation. It is replete with stories of madness stuck in a morass of misunderstanding, of wonderful people lost in the gracelessness of presumption, of being able to forgive the world but not the one who deserves it the most.
 
Who are we if not fools who fool ourselves and think it’s for the best - we bring about the harakiri of relationships through senseless ego skirmishes and unsubstantiated assumptions, and realise, much later, that it was actually for nothing. Alas, it is often just too late.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on passing on, gently, bravely, gorgeously   -
When Breath Becomes Air
What Do I Leave Behind
An Epitaph Made of Light & Air
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
 
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: If There Was A Bit Of You by Reegs'BFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10491-if-there-was-a-bit-of-youLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Music: Deep In The Soul by Reegs'BFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10278-deep-in-the-soulLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
 
 

Letting Go (A Childhood Song)

Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands.
Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt as big as childhood’s sandpit, even as we tell ourselves that leaving is the best thing to do, we feel bereft. What is it about childhood that we carry it inside us wherever we go, however far we might go? We carry it often as benediction, often as an abomination. If we are lucky, it’s the sunshine of those years which light up our later years, if all our growing is done in shadows, what we have inside is a throbbing hurting night. 
What do we make of ourselves because of those years when we were open and ready to receive and vulnerable? What is it that we take forward and what is that that we desperately want to leave behind? What is it that we wish was different, what is that we feel should be changed but now can’t? Is there an unwarranted guilt? Is there an anger, a sense of being cheated, a feeling that someone didn’t do their given duty, of giving something as elemental as caresses of breeze and drops of sun? 
Because only too often, we live only in the continent of regret, bereft of the balming buffets of past winds,  and stigmatise our entire lives to the memory of what can never be changed. Only when we quietly let go of what we have accumulated throughout our lives and find possibilities to remake ourselves in some form of a sunshine, can we come out as full individuals, tempered, touched but not scalded. 
We would finally find a new home.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the love, longing and loss of childhood   -
When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
My Little Zen Warrior
Kripa (a blessing from a daughter)
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: Heaven's Gate by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gateLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Tenderness in The Pause

I read this incredible poem today. And I weeped at its infinitesimal beauty. Tenderness by James Crews. Here it is - . 
 
Tenderness
 
You know how a half-buried stone
in the yard will clear all the snow
from around itself, little by little,
leaving only a hollow of warmth
and a cushion of moss you want
to rest on, until winter finally ends?
That's how tenderness works in us,
some heat rising up from beneath,
then spreading outward to touch
the lives of anyone who comes near -
slowly, softly, making a safe place
for them to stand in, melting away
the coldness that gathers around us.
 
It’s remarkable the way anger and desire and desolation and longing  and love work inside us simultaneously. It’s a unique human ability to hold all of this inside at the same time, wrapped, more often than not, in an envelope of tenderness.
 
And I think the only thing which makes us go on, in spite of all the hardships of heart that we face, is with that amazing hope that life will sort it all out for us. But the fact remains - to believe in this living is a hard way to live.
 
What makes people to persevere through their exhaustion, when in the name of hope there is nothing more than a recurrent duplicitous (dub plis  I tuhs) dawn? What makes people to keep their believe intact? That there is a road which they will turn and there will be different outcome to look out for?
 
Why are there not more suicides?
 
There have been tropes written on dimly-lit lifes which seem to be forever on the edge of insanity. But which look normal in their daily breath, the illusion of ordinariness making them mesh into the continuum of quotidian grey. This is normal - until it is not.
 
Suddenly there is an explosion- people snap and destroy things, lives - often their own. The alternative is even worse, there is an implosion, and aching bodies become islands of doom, as they suck all that is good and bountiful into their black hole. Entire landscapes of hearts stand barren - eviscerated rather than destroyed, rendered hopeless than killed.
 
Cruel men know this. They know the power men have on each other, how controlling lives is often only a factor of knowing what they care for most. It could be livelihood, it could be dignity, it could be trust, it could be faith. The lowest blow is always to the highest ideal, the deepest cut is always to the most transparent belief.
 
We, who are the simplest in our exposition of what we care for, are the most vulnerable to wounds. There will always be someone ready to exploit our guileless openness.
 
That’s why we require protectors of flames, the wise innocents, those who have been attacked but are still not cynical, those who are wounded but hold their scars as medals they’ve got for lost battles - for their richest lessons have come from their bitterest experiences, and how it makes them resolve to save those who are not able to fend for themselves.
 
And that’s why they have to be “half-buried stones in the yard” with their growing circle of tenderness, for good men to find their refuge.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the tenderest feelings we feel   -
This : One Grace
Aaschi - a promise
Infinite Tenderness
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: Wide Worlds by Tim KuligFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10273-wide-worldsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Music: Deep In The Soul by Reegs'BFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10278-deep-in-the-soulLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Dysfunctional Families (and other joys)

Who are we if not products of the first quarry of breath - the family? Raw, unmanaged, planned or perchance - we are babies who enter the universe with our lungs ballistic, versed in the art of annoying everybody, with our insistences and our demand for unwavering attention, but also to beguile.
 
Whether we are a chip of a dream or the product of a ritual or the gift of a drunken night, we are realities in the lives of a couple which looks onto us, sometimes with wonder, more often with unmitigated exasperation.
 
We are cradled with care, often as a result of a personal sacrifice, a priority over oneself. We are babies - we coo on recognition, we reach out for their faces with our little hands as if we are reaching out for light, and we smile on hearing their familiar voices. And however slowly it might be, we find places in our parent’s hearts.
 
But things change as we grow. We have a rough patch with our sister, scalding acrimony with our brother. We start seeing our parents as flawed human beings, people less invincible and more tired  then we’d ever imagined. People we are ready now to judge, people we now find easy to be cruel with. Suddenly the dynamics of our relationships change.
 
We move closer to other lives, and drift away from our primary caregivers, our first loves. Our needs change, our cravings are discoverers, and we open some cupboards in our soul to shelve a heap full of memories away. We move closer to other people, we become other people.
 
But our past is a forever undertow to our lives. And the strings pull us back - often for festivities, often for tragedies: sometimes as compulsion, often reluctantly. And we discover our heartstrings start to play again. Old joys well up, old griefs too. What we’d been told, when we were ignored. Slights we didn’t know we remembered, heartbreaks which still had fracture lines.
 
But beneath it all, our blood remembers it’s moorings, an old affection slowly blankets old afflictions,  and we realise we’d deserted them, but we’d never left them at all. We were carrying them inside as simmering geysers, as dark rivers. But they were also breath, they were also our first joy. And we move towards each other as long lost magnets,
 
And we know that maybe our blood finds its own tributaries, but that we are the same river moving towards the same sea. Our waters reflect the same sky. We are family.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the difficult art of surviving those closest to you   -
The Truth of Lies
Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave)
On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology
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: Untold Stories by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5844-untold-storiesLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

This: One Grace

Sometimes, without asking, we are gifted grace. It could be the strumming of a guitar from a neighbouring house some lazy afternoon, it could be the first sighting of a butterfly after a harsh winter, it could be a shared glance across a crowded metro coach, it could be the morning sun seeming to bend to greet you as you step into the street, of entering a lift and recognising the song seeping out of someone’s earphone.
 
These are dollops of sundrops left on our soul’s doorstep, almost to remind us that there is much more to life than only it’s mangled drudgery.
 
But the tragedy is that in our misconception to liken life to a race, we ignore these minuscule benedictions invariably strewn in our paths. And we miss out the chance to experience life’s stranger fullness, which says you take care of the big things to steady your ship, but if you ignore the little things you will go through this world empty.
 
And then there’s the karmic law of grace. What you give is also what you get back, often in multiples of abundance.
 
Are we the one with the glance? The progenitor of a secret note, the one who secretly funded a dream, the one who moved the curtain so the winter sun finds its way to the body of a loved one, the one who canceled a meeting to hear a little one’s incredibly important tale, the one who doesn’t remove a bloodless arm from beneath someone fast asleep?
In our willingness to go on a limb for a loved one or a stranger, we are plugging into the blessing of a mysterious force, the power of a spiritual community, a universe which always gives back.
 
Because love in its purest form is finally service, it’s our ability to find the finest parts of ourselves and make a gift of it. And this is invariably the unwritten history of our lives, which  comes back to us, as a story of survival - and  often to lighten the deepest darkness of  a stranger’s life.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the grace of love and life  -
The Comfort of Her Being
Infinite Tenderness
Come When The Heat of Noon Has Still Not Dimmed
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: Liberty Quest by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/293-liberty-questLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Aaschi

'Aaschi' is a beautiful Bengali word. It’s used when you are leaving home - for work, for pleasantries, for whatever. You say it to the folks you are leaving behind. Instead of saying “I’m going” you say “Aaschi”, which means “I’m coming back.” And this one simple word becomes a promise to return, a pledge that the parting is temporary. In its intonation, meaning and feeling, it’s an intimacy.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the tenderness of love  -
Extraordinary Life
Tenderness
Fallen Flowers
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
 
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Village Ambiance by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6586-village-ambianceLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Finding Ways To Survive (Each Other)

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

Replay: Lose A Lover Not A Friend

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