Uncut Poetry

How Can I Remain Calm

"I have seen the future hold stars
in its hands not knowing
how plastic were dreams.
I didn’t want the sound of my
breaking heart resound such
that the solar system be proved
wrong but I have seen seamless
skies filled with light and wonder
to be only refractions from the jagged
shards of broken hearts."
 
I have seen the most deprived child dream. Dream to become an astronaut, nothing less. Her family eats one meal a day, sends her to a school to give alphabets to her dreams, and tells her in the night before she goes to sleep hungry that this is her life, there’s nothing beyond. But nothing can stop her from dreaming.
 
When I talk to her, her eyes have still not dimmed of their stars, and she speaks in broken English and tells me why she loves the school. It is her escape from reality, which she hopes will be the wormhole out of her black hole. Into another dimension, into another realm, into another world.
 
At what juncture of their lives, do the dreams of children start to break?
 
As I try in my own ways to find a trapdoor to get them out of the swelter of their hopeless basement lives, I know it’s a battle. I focus on one, and the faces of a multitude appear - with the largest eyes and the brightest dreams you can imagine. And I’m overwhelmed. And I lose focus. And I lose sight of the fact that change occurs one at a time. One dream at a time. One pair of bright eyes at a time.
 
In the infinity of inequities, what might feel like the Sisyphean rock, is actually the journey inside - because destinations are never reached through a single highway, but invariably transverse the small dirt tracks and country roads, where we drive through clouds of dust, hoping to find clear skies and pellucid streams.
 
As we work together, they holding on to their dreams and I seeking out roads from reality to find the highway to their dreams, I often find the enormity of inequity. But what in our lives, if ever, is easy. And I can only tell, about ageless truths which say - if you hold on long enough, if you badger the universe inexorably, if you keep battling bad fortune with your sweat and blood pouring out of you, something will change - maybe as a principle, maybe as luck, maybe as a mere dent. And I will tell them each battle is an opening, a ladder, a progression into a different future - and nothing ever goes waste.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on childhood and its dreams:
When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
Difficult Child
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: The Song Of Sirens by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9663-the-song-of-sirensLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/
 

The One Who Left (Herself Behind)

Life pauses when heartbreaks occur - and then it doesn’t. It’s the nature of the beast that nothing stops. But momentum is often not a substitute for reparation. Time sutures wounds, but the scar is insubstitutable - and it often glows when we are lonely. And as memories tumble in, we tumble down. What comes as a rush are gestures and flourishes, the quirky and the infinitesimal, and the forgotten becomes unforgettable. We remember nothing huge but remember her hugely. For the fact is that people remain as traces, as the fine dust which settles on furniture and can clog our system without us being aware of it.
 
Nostalgia, thus, is more insidious than presence.
 
What is it about those who depart or leave us? Is love forever an interruption? Is it’s value always attached to departures and heartbreak? Is it the universe’s way of redeeming our lives but also punishing us for our non-attention when it might be needed the most? Is love’s exposition - as we see it in our peripheral vision - the one true measure of its bounty? The tiny unasked for gestures, the tea, the pat, the hug, the laugh. The light which comes from silence, the comfort which comes from presence.
 
We are engulfed in the generosity of people who we unrelentingly take for granted. And whose grace, tragically, lies unrequited till it is just too late.
 
No wonder, nostalgia is finally tragedy couched in a wistful smile.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on leaving and staying -
A City Made of Our Sighs
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 -
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
 
 

Infinite Tenderness

One of the abiding joys of growing old together is to remember insignificant minutiae - some which hurt like pebbles in a shoe and some which effortlessly made us remember why we were together.
 
To persevere in the complex dynamic of personal desires and conjoined plans is itself  a triumph. For if there’s one thing which relationships demand - after they’ve concretised the shaky foundations of love and blown apart its airy notions - is to see each other with new eyes after years of togetherness. To jettison back-stories, to wipe out bad behaviour, and to sit firmly on the conjoined hard earth, and look at the stardust (even if it’s a fistful) which got made together. Possibilities of persistence lie embedded in the ephemeral  and the insignificant, which we take the trouble to notice.
 
What gives us joy is not emblazoned in the skies. It comes unexpectedly as teardrops, and finds its way into us as a brook. We have to know how to lean in and how to linger, we have to know how to let the fragments pass us by - as is their won't - but not to lose the grace they invariably leave in their wake.
 
So much of what we are is predicated on things we don’t even notice - things which pass through the slivers of our thoughtlessness. It could be the cup of tea appearing before us every morning, it could be the slant of winter sun straining to reach out to our cold body, it could be the whiff of perfume which leaves us in restless anticipation. But these are the things which goldplate our brassy days and render magic where we think none is possible - if only we have the eyes to see it.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the tenderness of love -
I Love You
I Can Be Your Poem
Lovers In The Morning
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: Paradise Of Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9358-paradise-of-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 
 
 
 

The Life & Times of a Song

I can never forget the Sharukh Khan movie, Main Hoon Na, when a celestial orchestra comes in and he automatically starts singing , as soon as he sees the gorgeous Sushmita Sen being her ethereal self in incredible sarees.  And I remember thinking -  this is a superb idea, and what wouldn’t I do to have this facility from god?! But, alas, as the heavens never listened in to my desires, I curate my own music for my variegated moods.
 
I play music to the beat of my breath. As I brush my teeth, as I move from one place to another, as I work on a desk. It’s soft, When I want to concentrate on other things; it’s loud, when I’m drifting through life’s unavoidable drudgery; and the decibels become ruthless, when I’m head banging with issues.
 
Every morning as I go out for my jog, I run into an orchestra of shrill joy! I doubt if anything ever receives the welcome which birds give to every dawn. It’s the universe’s urging to living beings to realise we are alive - which also means being alive to all possibilities.
 
When I was growing, and had a house in Tribeni in Bengal and had the dark river Hooghly winding by, every night at nine I was out in the verandah with my battery-operated radio, to hear a sampling of old and current Hindi songs. It was always curated for a dulcet mood, just right for the time before bed. I used to put the radio on the concrete balustrade, and then jump to sit alongside. And I knew in the rows of houses, demarcated by flower beds and vegetable patches, several of my friends were doing exactly what I was. And the river flowed by silently behind me, as both of us eased into the folding night.
 
In my school and college days, to discover a song which we fell in love with meant we should know the lyrics to hum along with. Remember, those  were pre-internet days, and there was nothing available on tap. But for a buck we used to get cyclostyled booklets, printed on the most abysmally cheap paper, with the lyrics of the songs of the particular movie we wanted . And we used to memorise the l to heart. And that’s  how I discovered songs to be  poetry set to music.
 
Today, for this poetry podcast, I cannot think my poems without a musical underpinning. If the musical notes and my poetry mesh well, I feel heady.  I love hearing Call Me By Your Name or Bringing The Storm Home, for example, because the music seems to have been created just for those poems. (I feel this! Do you too?)
 
I see musician friends create music the way I write poetry - as a calling, as a compulsion, as survival. And I can imagine the experience of writing musical notes and lyrics to be as gorgeously uplifting as finishing a poem, making its way into tunes, after working out of split arteries.
 
As I hear the incredible thump and vigour and magic of ‘Varaha Roopam’ from ‘Kantara’, as I sit on my desk and write this, I know music as transcendental - something from beyond, something to take us beyond.
 
The poems mentioned here, where I feel the music magically meshes into the words are -
Bringing The Storm Home
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.
 
Illustration - Giselle Dekel
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Music: Odyssee by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/56-odysseeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
Music: The Way To Kataka by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11-the-way-to-katakaLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de
 
 

In the Winter of Our Relationships

NOTE - There are some recording audio disturbances in the first minute. Do excuse. 
 
What is it about conversations, that the ones most essential, are the ones we avoid the most?
 
With our anger or distress brimming over, are we afraid to show the power the other has over us to leave us with such vulnerability? Are we just frightened of the uncharted route the conversation might take? Are we afraid that however tenuous the fraught relationship, this was still one precious relationship, and why should we ruin it by cleaving it apart?
 
Or are we simply afraid to face our own truths, in the voices we still love or once loved dearly?
 
I’m personally afraid of strong reactions, of reactions which start at point a and then proceed to reach point z in a rush, annihilating everything in their wake. Conversations have often turned to slugging matches, and invariably resulted in arteries of our inner being being torn into shreds.
 
So many of my conversations have got completely emotionally wrought, where views are construed as accusations, where thoughts to resolve are taken as signs of intolerance, where everything ends with the words “You hate what I say and think and do. I will just withdraw into myself and not utter a word again.”
 
Conversations seeking reconciliation have ended in more distances.
 
What do we do to have conversations which bring us closer, to have distrust change into trust and our relationship to then build on that, to see honest feedback about the other’s characteristics, not as things we dislike but as the desire of a loved one to help the other.
 
I have realised that the depth of a relationship doesnt have a natural correlation with its width. Often the longest bonds are deep in habit and shallow in their richness. It is not a question of seeing each other’s best and worst and knowing each other inside out, but a simple question of respect. When you try to understand what the other means to say, when you try to know what makes the other do what they do, when you have faith enough to know that listening and absorbing are more difficult but more rewarding than merely reacting.
 
The persistence of a bond is a miracle, but seeking its depth with grace is a bigger one.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on collapsing relationships -
Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave)
The Door Is Unlocked. I Am Awake
Love's Night of the Long Knives
Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.
Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com
Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Music: Primeval [Electronic] by BanjopickerdeeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9988-primeval-electronicLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
 
 

And I Know These of You

One of the unending and unerring charms of knowing people is to know them as flawed people, whose very kinks make them the weird loveable irritating entities, who infuriate us but equally make us caring custodians of them.
 
The particularities of their weirdness is not meant for history books. It is often no more than the whimsy of habit, the caprice of reaction, or the peculiarity of a stand they take - nothing which takes away from who they are, nothing which requires a shovel to check their depths.
 
Ever so often, relationships get predicated on these quirks, which are no more, or less, than the ripples on a pond from a wind which decides to blow on it. If we reject the pond, we lose the treasures which lie in its depths.
 
To know, to understand, to adopt (and adapt to) each other’s quiddities is to have character and latitude, because it entails that we have the ability to look beyond the obvious brass to see the gold inside. And to realise that we are equally flawed and, in our peculiar ways, fun. If only someone could look beyond.
 
And to meet someone who gives us a glimpse into the gentle and the outrageous, the tangy and the plain, the obvious and the awesome, is to have encountered a whole universe in a person. To reject someone like this because the odd thing makes their heart go a-flutter, or they slurp soup in hideous ways, is the biggest injustice we can do to ourselves. Groan, growl, but persevere. There’s too much richness inside, which would require years to explore, and a lifetime to savour.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the lovable weirdness of people -
Dancing in the Rains
An Onanist's Guide to Loneliness
In the Darkness of Our Autobiographies
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: Paradise Of Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9358-paradise-of-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
Music: From my Heart With Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6267-from-my-heart-with-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 

Such are Such Days (or the days I make love to her)

Making love can be the tenderest experience of a day. Truth be told, the day should start and end with it - with nothing, nothing else to take away from its tangy exuberance. Those moments should be the day. But - we have to move on. There are things to be done. There are commitments to fulfil, a job to go to, groceries to be bought, a plumber to be contacted.
 
And suddenly such days get redefined, the Northern Lights lose their effulgence, not only by contrast, but because everything humdrum brings its drama into our senses. And we lose the one thing which should have been the only thing which was defining life that day.
 
What is it about us that, time and again, we lose sight of the ethereal and the beautiful. That we take lovemaking - this experience of life, death and rebirth - as a commonplace occurrence, as an ability available on tap - and hence lesser for it. Why do we human beings always diminish our own worlds and find ways to move on - when we should be hiding, lingering, treasuring. And not letting go of these moments where meaning is discerned, and everything else falls by the wayside.
 
Making love is our wildest and tenderest manifestation as sentient human beings. And for us to let an occasion pass or devolve into insignificance is nothing short of a tragedy. We speak too much of work-life balance and too little of work-sex balance. As one fully-alive philosopher once said - “Make love not war.” It might not solve the world’s problems, but it would definitely send us out into the world wishing for only good things to happen to it!
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on making love -
Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys
Finding Souls Between Their Legs
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: Sailing Through The Wide Sea by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6243-sailing-through-the-wide-seaLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles
 

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/