Uncut Poetry

Maybe, a Little Kindness

I have often been cruel. Knowingly, unconsciously. With people closest to me, and invariably  because I take them for granted. So it is a mini tragedy, when I sit down and have a conversation - and I’m short, I’m angry, I’m sarcastic.
 
Take my mum - she is frail now, though her voice still has passion, but is veering towards gentle tones now. And I can ‘win’ any battle by the sheer dint of volume. Pyrrhic victory, if there ever was one, as she goes silent, and I keep reading the newspaper as if nothing has happened.
 
We are both in a space of a confined relationship, whose contours could never be changed. I would be her son forever - and we were tied to each other inextricably, as fact, as benediction or affliction. Our relationship is one of perfect imperfection. We come with legacy in our blood and history in our senses, as we fill each other’s space on a daily - often hourly - basis. And within that proximity lies the very seed of slowly getting blinded to the good we do to each other. We start taking each other for granted.
 
And I mull on Oscar Wilde’s symbolical lines - “Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard…” The realisation is a sickening thud. Because to hurt a loved one is to do the irreconcilable. Circumstances might determine a future of forced togetherness , but the heart remembers what it remembers.
 
And scars take longer than forgiveness to lose their mark.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the preciousness of gentleness and kindness -
An Epitaph MAde of Light & Air
How To Hold Love as it Breaks
Kintsugi
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 -
Motivational Soft Piano Meets Cello by Horst Hoffman

Replay - A Home as an Open Dream

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.
 
"We would talk of the day to make
the outside world our own,
and lay joint claim
to our individual memories."
 
A home is of so many definitions. The place we grow in, the place we get our first intimations of the living world, the place we are desperate to get to at the end of a day - but also the place we are desperate to leave as we grow.
 
Often a shelter, often a prison, often just a roof, often the very symbol of unquestioning acceptance. We learn the meaning of bruises from those in the next room,  and the ill-imitable depth of love from those further down the hall. We learn there is often no difference between the command of an elder and the confines of an ego. We learn of chains of command and of the subtle exertion of real power.
 
We learn how some of the hardest decisions come from the softest heart, and male prerogative is often just a cover for cluelessness. We leave home for pilgrimages, when actually we are in search of a home. 
 
Home is deep nights and late escapes. Home is often of going away without looking back. And to die in peace often only means to have  found that address which we can finally call home - and to have that address find us.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which take you back home (and its strange dynamics!) - 
It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away
Extraordinary Life
A Morning Ramble on How Love is Rediscovered at the Bottom of Rubble
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 -
Romantic Piano  by Rafael KruxLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/5471-romantic-piano-License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I Like The Ordinary Life

This awareness, this stopping to see something insignificant, the overwhelming desire not to look at my mobile for long moments - I sometimes think it’s aging which is doing this to me. The fact that I have seen a bit of life, of tragedy and joy, of the big events of life and some, and no longer wish for the large and the loud.
 
Now what stops me are things which seem to happen in passing. A snatch of music, the stitching of a happy conversation, a stray comment followed with a comfortable silence, the sound of laughter drifting out from a street-level window. Suddenly these seem important. Often, when my dad and I stand in his room’s verandah, and watch a decaying sunset, the rays reflecting in the three lakes in front of us, his arm around my shoulder, my chest swells such that it seems it will burst open. 
 
I just know these are the things I will think of on my deathbed, and these are the things which will help me drift away serenely. So I am going about collecting these moments hungrily, as if there is no tomorrow.
 
Somewhere in our desire to see life only as movement from one high to another or as a remembrance only of the photographable, we lose sight of the infinitesimal, the mote in the sun-ray, the buzz of a wasp going busily about its business.
 
I’m just glad I’ve fallen in love with my common uninteresting unadventurous life.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the preciousness of the passing moment -
Mornings (as entry points to life)
Letting Go (A Childhood Song)
Tenderness in the Pause
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 -
Nothing but memories by Reegsb

A Sense of Her Tenderness

I doubt if there’s anybody who tends to words with such infinite tenderness. For her, they are rounded pebbles on a seashore, sea waves washing over naked feet, the gentle curve of the sea at the horizon.
 
She holds words the way I hold her.
 
But strangely when I think of her, it is always with a silent smile, like a truth which leaves us speechless, the way the sun slips out as a guest does when tired of a party.
 
I sometimes feel there’s too little of her in this world, someone who feels the world as a good place and sees it with forgiveness. I ask her what her greatest fear is and she says “Losing you.” I tease her and ask “Not losing yourself?” She looks at me and says “You’re there to find me. That’s why I can’t lose you.”
 
Then she adds “But I know something. In this life of unfinished hope, I also wish us dirt, passion, devotion. I want to burrow so deep into the entrails of life that I almost drown in its depths - and just because it can’t stand me anymore it spits me right out.”
 
I listen to her silently. And know the reason I love her is because she helps me see the wonder in everything which I fear. And in her boldness and her gentle desire lie her insistences. As if Hania Rani had given breath to her song ‘Esja’, and her notes wanted to break out and dance on the thinnest ice possible or at a precipice which could crumble and break.
 
And as we sit in the winter sun, our fingers intertwined, I realise how much she wanted to dance, with her words, with her life, with her being, with me. If life could be a music track, she would start with a hymn, let rap take over and then go out in a blaze of the most improvised jazz adventure possible!
 
And as I hold onto to her gentleness, I know her to be steel.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the serenity which comes with love -
Why We Should be Happy with Berry Jam of Table Edges
Come When The Heat of Noon Has Still Not Dimmed
I Fell In Love With You (Again) Beside the Tin of Sardines
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 -
Traveling OVer The Clouds by Musiclfiles

The Woman You See

We as persons are so much of the people who inhabit our lives. Not only by way of how they are connected to us and change the trajectory of our lives, but what they mean to us by way of how our souls evolve. But beyond it all is their influence on our minds and hearts to define to us what we are.
 
Sometimes we are unsure of our own abilities to achieve, to fulfil, to create. And though we might be brimming  with every talent, we might be an uncertain wreck inside, unable to comprehend the intensity of our own possibilities.
 
And then someone in our life comes by and refuses to accept our limitations.
 
They keep seeing beyond, they keep seeking more, they keep insisting that we are much more, that we are needlessly imprisoning ourselves in a low opinion of ourselves, and we can be beyond everything we can comprehend.
 
I remember a Japanese story where a girl considered plain by the whole world and jeered at whenever she came out of her house, is wooed by the most eligible man in the village, and he proposes with a record number of buffaloes, which nobody in the village could even comprehend. And soon enough the girl grows into becoming the beauty which her beau saw inside her.
 
Of course the story is allegorical, but it’s truth is not.
 
We grow into our best selves when someone refuses to believe that we are anything less.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on love & trust -
The Importance of Faith in Love
I Can Be Your Poem
Her Grace without Notice
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 -
Crescendiocity by Alexander Nakarada

How a Poem Finds Itself

We are never as strong as we feel we are. What’s ostensible, what’s shown, matters little. As we walk, with our eyes wide open, sometimes in wonder, often in fear, we need someone beside us to interpret the world.
 
A conversation is the blood flow of a love story.
 
To be generous enough to listen without interpretation, to hear without interruption, is a gift we give our loved ones. Because we already trust them. And everything we share with them is only an expansion of the shared world. There’s nothing good or bad, we are not judges, we are partners, and when we choose to let the other know everything, we let them into the fragility of our beings. There’s first fear, a testing out, as it were, for nobody wants to be broken by unkind hands. Then there’s unabashed laughter. Tears come in the end. Because that’s when dams burst, and you don’t mind, because you know there is someone ready to catch every teardrop, so that the sorrow doesn’t go unacknowledged or wasted.
 
I think tenderness as a vital ingredient of love is often underestimated.
 
Knowing how the trajectory of our lives changes due to the entry of some people in our lives, we need a safe zone for our fears and vulnerabilities. Often we find it immediately, often we need to search on, often never.
 
Much more then the highs and the rush of dopamine which love gives, what finally sustains it is the generosity we accord each other as a place of protection. Where we know we can say anything without being judged, where we can be goofy without a cantankerous response. Or be afforded a strong attempt to understand even on disapproval of what we’ve revealed of ourselves.
 
Else then love is a snail out in a tentative dawn, which senses danger and withdraws within its shell, and finds it difficult to emerge again.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on poems themselves -
The Life & Times of a Song
Stopping by a Cafe to Drink a Poem
I Don't Think Poetry Will Save Us. But Yet, and Yet....
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: When Life Is Beautiful by KALAKFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11355-when-life-is-beautifulLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 

Your Body is a Truth

Deep inside, we all seek grounding.
 
In the complex hullabaloo of desires, facades and one-upmanship, within sudden dollops of searing clarity, we search for the timbre of our being and realise the glitzy syncretic synthetic fabric it is made of. And the disquiet emerges.
 
If the rot in our beings is not all-pervasive, the disquiet is a beginning to our conscience wanting redemption. We want to return to a point where we’d not lost our innocence though the ways of the world might have brought both wisdom and cynicism in its wake.
 
And this shows up in all our relationships. In the way we confess to love, in the way we make love. There are truths waiting to be revealed, there are truths wanting to be told. At our most elemental state, we seek the danger of vulnerability, to come clean with our soul. We are ready to lose much for a glimpse of that one clouded truth.
 
As we drift back into the other world of our lives, we then carry the revelation inside. We already know it’s power, we know it’s ability to cleanse, but we also know it’s revelatory power. And we decide, through its possibilities of disruption, to let’s it’s coruscating effulgence to emerge, and in one stroke bring us back to that state where we might stand damaged but we are cleansed. We are one with ourselves.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the loneliness of a craving body -
Flutter
Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys
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 details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
 
Music: Romantic Interlude [Full version] by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10421-romantic-interlude-full-versionLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
Music: Time Of Mourning by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9646-time-of-mourningLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

What Stretches in Front

As 2023 turns its back with a sigh, we walk into a brand new year.
 
Hope - with all its bewitching deceptions - will make us wish for our best selves, to slough off the undesirable and ugly, and emerge fresh and wet, with unfazed optimism to conquer the world. But soon enough, we will know that, as always, all we need to do is to conquer ourselves.
 
And I sit down and make a list of what I want to leave behind in the old year and another list of what I want of the new year. And then I realise. - the new year wants nothing of me.
 
It’s a sobering thought.
 
And forces me to think of everyone in my life who loves me unquestionably, and expects nothing but an ear to listen as we sip our tea together, and a hand to hold as we go out into the world.
 
Hence my only wish for myself - and for everyone in this world - is that we honour time and we create space. For we have to both hurry in this life and not forget to savour the moment. Because we need to both honour our ambition and be beside those who need us beside them.
 
May we all be unafraid to do what we love, and find peace in the torn and tattered bounty of what we are.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ephemeral nature of time -
Letting go (because I am alive)
Memory Keeper
Falling Into a New Year
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: Moments by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11940-momentsLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Letting Go (because I’m alive)

One of the incredible things which are little talked about, but one which I notice ever so often around me, is how the loss of love often frees a person in magical ways.
 
I tell myself - it can’t be love if it’s absence gives the feeling of liberation. But I also know how life’s bounty comes in contrarian ways. There is life within love, but there could well be revelry beyond.
 
I know of at least two ladies, who have had solid and steady and happy married lives, but after the demise of their respective husbands, have rediscovered life in a million ways - the freedom to travel as they wished, of going out when they wanted, of dressing up as they wished. It was almost as if we were seeing a different persona emerging from a cocoon we did not even know existed.
 
The end of the world is never nigh. However deep the depths of our sorrow. It’s the simple truth of living. Nothing destroys us if we don’t allow it to - in fact within the seeds of the worst resides the incandescence of the best.
 
Because that is what life demands of us, to discover or (as in this case) rediscover the basic premise of living  -  to be both wild and wise.
 
Wisdom allows us to bear, forbear, adjust to, compromise with, until something breaks loose. And that could be with or without the person you love. If we are open to possibilities, there is nothing which will stop us from the rediscovery of the gorgeous in the mundane, of the magnificent beyond the obvious.
 
I hold on to love with my dear life, but I keep knocking out the walls of what’s routine, the dreary, the drab, to ensure that in this one life of mine, I do not lose out on seeing the sunrise when it needs to be seen just because someone wants me to sleep late - not just one day, but day after day.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the transience of of love -
The Things We Become When We Leave
Loneliness (oh these rains)
I Will Leave The Last Line For You To Fill
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: Garten Eden by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/477-garten-edenLicensed under
CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
 
Music: Mystical Autumn by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9755-mystical-autumnLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Replay - The Complexity of Simple Lives

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.
 
An ordinary life is so complex. In its unending inevitabilities and Gordian knots it is both an unravelling puzzle and an enduring mystery. To mesh our life’s experiences with those who we love, is itself a quotidian Everest to be conquered. And we slip, and we fail, and we try valiantly and fail miserably. And then we pick ourselves up and start all over again, and then we fail again. And then we find a rhythm and we lose it. Recriminations and regrets galore come into the equation, and we again seek balance and again find ourselves in the deep end.
 
What is it about ordinary lives? Why does nothing find an equilibrium? And why, when it seems tranquil, it sinks in a morass of habit.
 
What is a complete life, and how does a couple find it? Does it exist in sacrifice and adjustment or does it reside in the brave singularity of lives which happen to find togetherness.
 
As love stops  being a wandering minstrel and works towards finding tranquility in the domestic, the lines of everything gets blurred and within its confined confusion lies the truth of two fully alive people living half lives.
 
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of ordinary lives  -
A Home as an Open Dream
Extraordinary Life
The Ageing of Love
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 -
Your name by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/13-your-nameLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license