Uncut Poetry

They say, in actuality, there are only two kinds of people in the world - fighters and survivors. I have often thought about this grim prognosis of life, and without attributing anything dire to it, I really think it is close to truth.   In seeking acceptances, we often have to struggle with the true us and the version the world wants to see. Because we are first a subset of a larger expectation before we start to even begin to be our own person.   The corollary to this is often the complete abdication of lives. Most often to parents, soon enough to partners - husbands, lovers. We are first loved for what we are, and then are given a larger acceptance only if we confirm to their idea of us. If we waver from there, try to become something which is truly us, if we protest, we have to face consequences. It could start from emotional appeal, transcend to consequences, end in incarcerations of all kinds.   We often seek refuge, escapes; clutch at straws, good hearts; and find ourselves giving into patterns. One prison for another, as it were. Unconsciously we build shackles inside of us. Without realising we have become our own prisoners. Which becomes difficult to break out of.   There IS redemption. Alas, it comes with a high price - shame, isolation, death. Often even unconditional love is not enough, as it it riddled with complex past archetypes, windmills of the confounded mind, as it were. We are finally of ourselves, suicidally jettisoning this one wondrous life.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems talking about our relationship with parents -  My Mother is Full of Water and Ready for Sonography Mother's Rambling Lessons on Life Imparted in Morning Walks in my Childhood Tea-a-Tete with Mum & Dad 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 - Yesteryears (DECISION) by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/244-yesteryears-decisionLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I went to Varanasi a few weeks back, and spent time wandering the lanes, in temples, on the ghats, sitting beside the river.   I was a non-sequitur: a non-believer in a holy city, amidst people who had the name of god continuously on their lips. And I saw holiness and ordinariness mesh in seamless ways. Almost like a message that a spiritual search did not entail you to be anything other than what you are - messy, complex, confused. Because that is where every journey begins.   Varanasi is special because unlike other holy cities - Vrindavan, Assisi, Ujjain, Vatican - it is not a mere destination - it is the beginning of a journey. That’s why it’s co-existence as a city of chaos and one of silences, gives it a sense of transcendence.   Because that is what, if you really think about it, true religion is all about. It starts with belief, not cynicism; it has intimations of doubt, bouts of questions, dollops of scientific inquiries. And the only reason a person persists is because she knows there are too many questions which the normal human experience cannot answer. And in the space of the unexplainable, we find what seems like the miraculous. We can accept it as grace, and move in our lives with a sense of utmost gratefulness. Or we can give it a name. God. The Unexplained. Mystery. Maybe - mother.   In whatever way we find the Unknown, Varanasi is an immersion. With or without the holy dip.  It will never leave you unaffected, unmoved or unscathed. Varanasi will hurt you - even as it holds you, heals you, makes you its own.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the holy -  Windblown Om Capturing the Feeling When the Goddesses Depart 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 - Lockdown by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7658-lockdownLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Strange New Worlds by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10369-strange-new-worldsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Whenever I see couples getting hitched, I say a silent prayer of thankfulness.   Because every day the couple has a ringside view of each other, of things which they say and do. They crack a small joke, they fulfil small wishes, they stop someone from stumbling, they secretly make someone’s favourite dish,they listen with their bodies, they stand beside the window and see the morning sun drop on the floor.   We all need someone in our lives who can see us for what we are, way beyond what the world sees us, as someone made of greatness and grime, someone who is beautiful and ugly at the same time. Someone who sees us as selfish and doesn’t turn away, someone who recognises the smallest gesture as generosity and embraces us for that.   To be ready to be a couple is to be with each other, through the massive and the minute, to know we can be huge in tumult and small in celebration, and still not turn away, because we have promised to take each other as we are. To know that we have the capability to accept  way beyond what we can dream of.   Because we are privileged to be the witnesses of the lives our lovers lead.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of love as a thing to be witnessed -  Coming to Your Side of the Bed Letting Go (because I'm alive) The Things We Become When We Leave 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 - Sensitive Cinematic Romantic by Musiclfiles

We are such carriers of burdens. We have nothing to lose, but we carry the weight of such unnecessities. In the end, irrespective of what the Pharaohs believed, we have to leave everything behind. Which then probably is the only time we truly travel light.   But here we are - seducing, desiring, acquiring - and if not for things, we are busy burdening ourselves with myriad feelings, emotions which we should have experienced and moved on from, felt and unfelt, tasted, remembered and then forgotten.   But such is our blind-sightedness for immortality, our instinct to persevere and our desire of acquiescence, that we give the halo of permanence to the things which are most ephemeral. And therein lies the deepest cut. Because much more dangerous than the quicksand of useless acquisitions is the accumulation of feelings. And how little do we know how to handle those.   It is never our passage through emotions that is deleterious, it is our staying in those emotions which creates havoc. Because that’s when we ponder and speculate and conjure - and invariably think of the worst.  Much more than the action which precipitates our feelings, it is our continual analysis which brings about fractures in relationships.   We have to learn to live through passing storms of ties, be swirled, tossed around, battered, but then to survive and move back into the warmth of our mutual sanctuaries.   If we realise that it is in the nature of things that they don’t last, we would be less hard on ourselves or others.    If we stop being conscious of the world and learn to revel in the quixotic quirkiness of our beings, and learn to laugh at and laugh about it, we would have found the core of life’s mysteries. Laugh and move on.   There would be no need to go to another realm to find ourselves.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on things we gather and those that we leave -  Balancing Beginnings Yearning (and other things we carry in the journey) Gather Me 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 - Liberty Quest by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/293-liberty-questLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

So much of the good we have, things we are proud of, our looks, our most innate traits, are in truth merely gifts. They are an inheritance in our blood, nature’s largesse for us to build on.   But what we become is a factor of what we do with what we are given.   We can hold these gifts as talisman, to seek the good beyond them, to figure out our dharma, the very core of why we are in this world. Or we can just let them define us in shallow ways, as we work behind the facade, building our dynasty of desire.   I am just glad to be part of a family which is both my biggest cheerleader and the sternest rapper of knuckles possible.   Our strictest teachers are the ones who love us the most. The ones who hammer into us where we’ve gone astray are the ones who cry and pray for us in the silence of the night.   I am blessed to be born to the parents I have. Not that he has much choice, but I hope my son looks back to me some day and feels the same thing.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how kindness changes lives -  Maybe, a little kindness What I Miss is the Tender Moment The Grace That We Give 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 - Francescas Story by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/2981-francescas-storyLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

So much of what we are is because of abandonment. Often as reality, often as feeling. We talk but we don’t get through. Our silences are many, none find a resolution. Our words come out with warm intent, but when conjoined sound harsh. We love to death the very person we find the most fault with.   But in this morass of disintegrating hope, we are firm on continuums. We are not ready to give up. Because we know things change, people change. And no season is permanent.   And such do relationships survive.   And often, very often, they find their equilibrium. Not so much as a reconciliation, which is often there, but as an understanding. Beyond the spontaneity of an outburst, or the harshness of a habitual word, one recognises the heart, well hidden though it might be. And then everything is forgiven.   But there are times when such understandings do not emerge. And that’s when two good people are found to be excavating the worst of themselves: in relationships people discover the depths of depravity or dismay or disillusionment that they can reach.   Alas, that is what then defines us as people - everything else is forgotten.   Even if we move to the other side of the bed, we find it empty.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the complex rhythms of relationships -  Tracing Shadows on Your Back Letting Go (because I'm alive) Of love (& other bouts of sadness) 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 - Good men do bad things by Phat Sounds Shadows of Autumn full version by Musiclfiles

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 walk under boughs heavy with fragrance, petals touching our cheeks with infinitesimal tenderness, and think back to how meaningless was what we’d said.   In a universe of a million possibilities, we could be a certainty, but we suffered our uncertain inequities.    We should have found tenderness like kittens venturing into the world - with fright and wonder and the ability to believe. Alas, we stopped at our conceptions of each other."   They say “The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.” In that one coruscating truth lies the crux of relationships. The question then is not of doubts or misgivings or dwindling love, but it is - have you given yourselves enough time? In that one question lies an irrevocable truth - things take no time to unravel but take time to settle.   You have to keep examining, you have to keep asking. Why don't you care? Why did you hurt me? Why did this happen? Why do you believe this about me?   Why did you do this?   The answers would be unsatisfactory, they will be evasive, but though they might not bring clarity to you, they will make the other think. And they will understand why you hurt, where you hurt. The shrapnel will be blunted.   At the same time, you are embracing your own strengths, the preciousness that you bring, the value of what you are, and it nullifies when others attempt to make you think less of yourself .   You will not like everything, but you will understand a few things. You will be able to cut through the fluff of your own misconceptions, and theirs, to understand the truth of what makes relationships work.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on complexities of relationships  - Why Don't You Make Love to Me Anymore? That Gorgeous Evening When You Left He Made Lasagna Before He Left 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 - Heart Love by MusicLFilesLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Asperger by Sascha Ende®Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/9264-aspergerLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

It’s one of the ironies of life that relationships which have persisted for years, often have hesitation built into their fibre. You know everything of each other, but are still not sure of your place in their lives. The important thing which keeps haunting you is - what do both of you mean to each other.   You say the things which you have been saying for years, she reacts the way she has been reacting for years, and both of you dislike the way you have conducted the conversation. But you have not been able to reconcile with the hurt which you somehow convey in that interaction. You are completely off sync. You feel you are being normal, she feels she is being normal, but you are totally off kilter.   And you’re not able to reconcile what is wrong in the way you are with each other.   I have often wondered how misconceptions persist over the years. It’s not for want of trying. You attempt trying to make each other understand your love languages, and to show where things hurt, and how what’s normal for him is hurt for her, or how a simple word or gesture can be so irritating, devastating or problematic. But what you get in return is another layer of misunderstanding.   You of course love each other. There’s too much you’ve been through - joys, pain, babies, walks, coffee breaks, loved meals, cookouts, relatives you don’t like, friends you love, movies you’ve seen holding hands, music you’ve both loved with tears in your eyes, the dresses you’ve admired each other in, the dusks you’ve spent doing nothing but holding each other. All the little things which have made you persist. But even then the questions persist.   And such do simple lives find their own ways to fragile devastation.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the simple complexities of love - Letting Go (because I am alive) Of Love (& other bouts of sadness) What I Miss is the Tender Moment 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 - Natural Paradise by Musiclfiles

As I gear up for the Ed Sheeran show, I’ve been trying to fathom the excitement in me! I’ve seen some terrific shows - Kylie Minogue, Kate Perry, Michael Jackson (omg - goosebumps!), Norah Jones, Michael Learns to Rock, and the innumerable gigs of favourite Indian singers and jazz bands - and somehow when I see tour rosters of my favourite artistes, I keep wondering if i can match my travelling plans to catch them perform.   And there are so many. The ones I would love to catch - Billie Elish, Sia, Mansa Jimmy, Elisapie, Hania Rani, Birdy, Jon Batiste, Ali Sethi - just to name a few! And the ones I will regrettably never be able to hear - Leonard Cohen, The Doors, Ghulam Ali, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkle. Somehow when I draw a circle, to denote the completeness of my life, these invariably feature as a factor.   It’s easy to say that we are merely listeners, as we sit in a hall, a stadium, under darkened ceilings or lie flat with starlight above. But when a listener gets drenched in the music she loves, there is both a transcendence and an immersion, which is as much a part of music being for the listener’s soul, as it is the musician’s  in creating sublimity.   I have stood with 50000 fans and sang along songs which each one of us knew by heart, and felt transported. Felt communion, felt lifted, knew the meaning of soaring.    Apart from the concerts, with their presence of community and crowd, for me music is an intimate accompaniment to life rhythms. I have music playing almost through my waking hours. Soft, often indescribable, often random. But for me, it is a way to be more productive, to bold-italic-underline the moment. It makes life more important, richer. Whilst it is often considered mere distraction, it never is. It is forever giving. It enriches, even as it is played in the background.   I have often puzzled how the most puerile of lyrics (“love, love me do, I love you too” - for Christ’s sake!) become ear-worm and stay with us throughout our lives. Such is the power of music notes, the words and their inimitable interlinking. But in that remembrance they often transport us to some place of essential innocence, a place of swaying trees, a breezy arbour of sundrops and shade.   If music is first sound, then our first intimation of love - our Mum’s gentle cooing - has to be the first music note which gives us the confidence to believe the rest of the world. And possibly therein lies the kernel of music’s mysterious warmth and comfort, the reason why we often forget the notes but remember the feeling.   We are home with the music we love.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the advent of esctasy - Flutter Gather Me Ceremony of Longing 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 - Die Unendliche Geschichte by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/512-die-unendliche-geschichteLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Ranjit Hoskote, the famous art critic,  poet ,writer wrote an amazing piece on Gaza and the humanitarian tragedy unfolding there. It was a piece which broke my heart, truly, as it brought out in sharp relief the incredible carnage taking place with impunity and for days on end.   But then he interlinked Gaza with Kashmir.   And that was something which he did casually, as if he was duty-bound to do so, as a fact.  And I was grieved that someone so sensitive and aware, could also be so frivolous, so tone-deaf. And suddenly I realised how much his words were artifice, played to a gallery, which would anyway cheer him along.   It disturbs me that poets, writers, thinkers find it expedient to bring in Kashmir in all narratives of torture, pain, without delving deeper into the principal issues, without historical perspective, without even trying to find what the present reality is, the truth of the ongoing narrative. This casual interlinking, using Kashmir as common coinage is something which truly disturbs me. Hence this poem.   Read the incredibly sensitive essay here -  https://scroll.in/article/1063846/ranjit-hoskote-in-our-interconnected-world-gaza-is-everywhere   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the meaning and price of freedom - For Anyone Who Bleeds Blood & Light in the War Zone Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh 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 - Medieval Love by Frank Schroeter

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

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

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

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

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

We are living in extraordinary times,  when everything we know as normal is being pulled asunder.    We need to desperately step back and relook at our lives with new eyes. And we have to  discover how much we have lost to come so far.   Is this grim time then the time to rediscover the pleasures of those pristine times?

Cities and love stories are so intimately intertwined that often the city becomes a character in the tale. And because of that, it also becomes a savior. Because love may depart, but the roads and the shades and the corners don't - and the city becomes a precious talisman for the mourning lover to hold onto.

Which love story isn't tumultuous? And if it is a story which spans decades, the years of togetherness have necessarily to also be years of disagreements. But the will to ride over it all, irrespective, is a sign of incredible commitment. When life ebbs, and what remains in the last moments are memories, it's always a 'feeling' which overrides all 'facts'.

This poem is about a friend who'd lost her mother - and then her father- in quick succession. And I asked her about what the loss meant. And she could only remember the smallest things of them which suddenly had the biggest meanings.   And this is what love does - it makes us notice the smallest of quirks, which makes our loved one what she is. Alas, sometimes, after they are no more.

'Uncut Poetry' is a podcast featuring the poetry of Sunil Bhandari, a poet from Calcutta, India. Sunil says "For me, poetry is a compulsion. It's the way I discover the world inside myself, sort out issues, and come to resolutions. In the very minutiae of my poems, lie the biggest answers of my life." 'Uncut Poetry' hopes its poetry will be the start of a conversation the listener will have with herself.

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

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

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

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

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

My son got married a few days back to his sweetheart. Both of them make an adorable couple.   As always I’m in awe of people in love who decide to marry each other. I know the atavistic urges and the reasons why we seek to gravitate towards a permanence in our deepest relationships, but I also know how the shelters of each other’s arms is ever so often open to storms and thunder. Roofs leak, houses get blown away. The reason why we marry could also be the reason we suffer.   But from time immemorial, marriage has been found to be a risk worth taking. Embedded in its imperfections, it’s scars, it’s lesions, are it’s flights.   But then, love always starts as an adventure, but finally seeks rest. And that takes time. And patience.   Like everything good, there is much which needs to be transversed, to be taken cognisance of - and forgotten. I sometimes feel sagas of love would do better with poor memories.   Do relationships get better with time? Do they eventually find plateaus of calm? What is the mystery of the alchemy which makes two different people find their peace together?   For me it’s - space and an ear.   Whatever is a couple’s decision on the most minute of things, it has to transverse a conversation, which has more listening then talking. We should never have a problem with a differing view - we grow as persons because of people who do not agree with us, but who have listened deeply and are also ready to change because of us.   Life is a cornucopia of choices. To restrict it to only our own world view is to asphyxiate (as fix see eyt) our very soul. To love a person is to love their differences, to let them enlarge our worlds, to help let us find meaning in every part of our separateness.   That’s why, whenever I wish for love I wish for disparities (for the adventure) and kindness (for the good sleep). I doubt if love would demand any other generosity than this.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the transitions of love: The One Who Left (herself behind) I Love You The Importance of Faith in 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: True Summer Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9369-true-summer-loveLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: End Of Summer by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6633-end-of-summerLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

So much of old age - like life itself - is of acceptance.   I saw a young girl, without fear or preconception,  pet a dog which had just snapped at me. She simply found the love inside her and in some mysterious manner it transmitted to the dog. And I wondered if this wasn’t exactly what life was - like that instinctive dog, which subconsciously knew the deepest instinct of love or indifference.   And so much of how we age - happily forgetful or bitterly reminiscing - is how we’ve lived. We often forget that every breath given is a gift bequeathed to us. As also what we will be as we age. We could be dissolute but generous, we could be self focused but harmless, we could think first of ourselves but always with a good thought for others. And when we reach a genial age, we will have the legacy of smiles in our bag of memories and a rucksack of goodwill to help us get over the rocky terrain which old age invariably brings.   Grace is my favourite word. And when I see it in people, in their demeanour, thought or behaviour, I give into that generosity. Because that is what it is - the ability to maintain dignity and care and understanding in both good and bad times and in front of good and bad people. Because grace leaves levity in its wake.   For to be old - and then to pass on - and having left behind a space of serenity, is to have succeeded in life and to have shown death how exits should be made.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the tired grace of growing old A Cynical Old Man Acknowledges His Birthday Very Grudgingly Ruins Have Permanent Flames 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - New Sky by Rafael Krux Cold and Frightened by Steven O'Brien

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

I’ve been thinking these past few days of sanctuaries - of how we take some for granted, how we crave for some. Sometimes both at the same time. I also think of how homes are most often our sanctuaries - but so are memories, so are our desires, as also our regrets. We regret chances we got and didn’t hold onto - we console ourselves that the chances at least stopped by at our doorstep.   Of course, the shelter of first choice, and last resort, is often a person. Someone who listens, doesn’t spoil things with advice, has a broad shoulder to put our hard head on, and arms wide enough to embrace our biggest sadnesses. More than the person we love, often it’s the person who is the least judgemental that we turn to.   Often mere presence helps, sometimes it’s just a coffee and a slow moving conversation discussing trifles and insignificances. But often, there is just no substitute for the physical presence of a person. I have felt real hurt inside in the region of my arms and chest, hurt with the desire to have someone sink there, to hold onto someone, to feel familiar texture of skin on my skin. To deeply inhale a familiar scent, a body odour which resides in every layer of my memory.   One feels bereft without this simple physicality and the sadness is insurmountable. We realize, at such times, how much we are finally beings invariably left by the creator in the care of other beings. However much we might reject their company or shun them because of their irritations, their presence is often the difference between maintaining our sanity and losing it. In however infinitesimal degree it might be.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the space loves seeks to grow: What I Miss is the Tender Moment Living in a World Deficient in Hugs 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Wide Worlds by Tim KuligFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10273-wide-worldsLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Like almost every human being in this world, I am perforce political. The fact that I rarely let that side of me seep into my art, hasn’t stopped me from seeing, reading, feeling, reacting. And the singular skew of the narrative and the increasing sharpness of tone of response, and the frightening cohesion of ideologues is disturbing.   It’s a tragedy of our times that time and again we face a world where human beings are razed into dust - and we are asked to be selectively outraged. One foetus torn out of a mother’s womb is less talked about then the bombed-out hospital full of children which is cynically being used to shelter terrorists.   I read, I observe, academically, artistically, with growing dismay. I can see how everything is distorted, where bastions of free media are compromised, and ideology masquerades as unbiased thinking, mendacity struts as editorial slant.   The manipulation of images and stories, the surging protests, the singular pointedness of agony without referencing reasons, are not so much changing my world as making it progressively clear how we are puppets in the industry of the proselyte.   I see good friends, well-meaning chums, whose centrist belief of live-and-let-live, has conjoined with mine, and we have been similarly outraged at extremities of all kinds. Until we started noticing the growing mendacity of feed, the slow poisoning of the story-telling, as it were. And the horrors of both the right and left paled in front of the terror of the liberal. The facade of civilisation and the plum accents of those who stood cemented in medieval thought was flooding both news and the timelines.   The thinker Naval Ravikant wrote in his almanack “Any belief you took in a package … is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles. I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.” For good measure he added “ To be honest, speak without identity.”   And as the world was beset with one calamitous flagration after another, it was clear how truth was always the first victim in the tragedy. Newspapers had vitriolic opinion pieces masquerading as front page news items, prominent news channels had clear religious agendas behind their reputation of credibility, poets tore their hearts out only when deaths occurred on one side of the border.   All this was open secret for those who studied, observed, knew. What’s new is how ruthlessly the present tragedy has revealed the hypocrisies of peddlers.  The fangs have been revealed for the whole world to see. But are we learning? Go back to what Naval had said. We are all so intricately tied with our ideologies and beliefs that to now abandon them is to lose the core of what we stood for. We would be ‘othered’ in the very society which has given us our identity. So we keep quiet. And the overwhelming lie of the aggressor grows and fills the empty space.   I write this as my attempt to reclaim that lost space inside me. I want to take a stand for myself. To delve deeper into the history and culture and devilish agenda  to understand the cynicism of the narrative disguised as a torn body or a dulcet poem.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the futility of wars and ideologies: No Revolution is Complete Without a Ruined Soul For Anyone Who Bleeds Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Clockwork Lullaby by Otis GallowayFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10482-clockwork-lullabyLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Mornings are such fabulous entry points. This time of dark departures and silent welcomes. Something which is sheltered tenderly through the night is brought out, a chance to wipe every falling tear, the time to see if blossoms can blossom to wipe the night’s sorrow, when the pleasure of the view far surpasses the depth of a nightmare.    I often wake up feeling stale, helplessly hoping for streaks of light, and step out into the uncertain dawn, which wonders about its status, but still moves ahead with its uncertainties. And that gives confidence, that emerging of an old world as new. And I step out naked to all feelings, open to change, open to jettison the old, to make way for acts of strange bravery.   There’s this tingling, as the skies find ways to give into colour, just as a singer says “this is the naked truth, this is the light”. And you wonder if this is a start or a break, for truths have to be given their due in ways you will never realize. Pulchritude has a price, you think, but you postpone the thought, as there is too much to absorb - thinking can be done later. And you realize there is only one place to go - forward.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the grace of mornings: Lovers in the Morning A Morning Ramble on How Love is Rediscovered at the Bottom of Rubble Sipping Tea in a Rumi 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.   Following is the music used in this episode -   Music: Tranquil Fields Peaceful by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5769-tranquil-fields-peacefulLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Sunny Morning by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7813-sunny-morningLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

As the years have gone by, I must confess life has confused more than clarified. Possibly life is a tease, urging me to study the deeper truths of our being, meditate on possibilities, and find what sustains, what doesn’t.   And till that happens, I stay in the splendid anagrams of my confusions. And first up on that is - love. Having a life full of seeing it, reading of it, passing through it, being abandoned by it, seeing it implode around me, knowing it to be the ash it is, love is a puzzle, to say the least.   I have lost the definition of what it is. I have seen what people who are in it do, I have seen it’s destructive power, I have seen it as obsession,  I have read, seen, experienced the art created for it by people who are in it or without.   I have seen it being called out as permanent, life-affirming, what makes the world go around. But when I examine it, I see it more as courtesy, as priority; and as time goes by, as duty, as habit.   Love grows into strange synonyms.   And I muse, sometimes dismayed, more often merely cynical, wondering if love wasn't just an invention for propagation, to give emotion to procreation, a feel-good, an entertainment, a  melodramatic journey to pain through joy.   Beyond the hyperbole of spiritual bliss (which is too beatific to be true), and the purple prose of the besotted  (which is too pink for good health), I only see forbearance of the patient, life as a means to navigate relationships, find balance in confusion, and awareness in illusion.   Lovers are all purveyors and creators, ready for fiction - and forever eager to believe their own tales.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on love's myriad sides: Living in a World Deficient in Hugs I Will Leave The Last Line For You To Fill Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms and Lovers In Spate 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Rising Sun by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/86-rising-sunLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I keep returning to the themes of missing out on the small things which make us feel human, nay, which reward us because we are human. And how their absence is often the biggest tragedy of our lives.   Often the absence is because of unawareness; but when we yearn for them, search for them, the tangibility of tragedy is like physical pain. Our home then becomes just an address, often the one we love becomes just a habit. And roiled in the battles of the day, we lose out on the tender moment.   The unasked for hug, tracing shadows on her dimpled back, searching for each other’s hands when your favourite song plays, to be aware of each other’s presence wherever you might be in a crowded room,  the poems you read together, the time the tears flow and you know you’ve crossed the line, knowing your silences to be pauses to heal, the non-judgemental indulgence, the forgiveness for being our worst selves at the end of a gruelling day.   Our individual recognitions coming out of us or to us as small prayers, and the entirety of our lives suddenly surrounded with an illimitable grace, brighter than light, softer than dawn, the minutiae becoming bigger than the biggest triumph we can conceive of in our lives.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the grace and beauty of small things: This: One Grace One Morning, The Ants Mother's Rambling Lessons On Life Imparted in Morning Walks in My Childhood Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Relaxing Guitar by LironFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7722-relaxing-guitarLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The more I live the more I understand - and appreciate - the import of interconnectedness and transience of all things.   The rains come, and so does a gnawing feeling seeking something undefinable; love comes with its fullness, and we wait for the infinitesimal more; the lane we stay is alive with sandwich cafés and chairs on pavements and we sit alone, worse, feeling alone; the temple bells and the sound of om carries to us and we think of our place in the world. The universe carries us in its arms into its enveloping warmth, and we don’t recognise the gift.   And in the flood of disappointments, we conjure love as mere presence, failing to recognise that it is first a feeling, and then touch. We become prisoners of our own unending emptiness, without first immersing ourselves in what we have already been gifted.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how rains and storms come into our lives: Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms and Lovers in Spate Dancing in the Rains Waiting for a Storm Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Lonely Fish by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4655-lonely-fishLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Of course, relationships have rules. The fact that we are animals plus, a more evolved species, only recognizes the fact that humans are feeling, trusting, hurting beings. And in the depth of that reality lies the fact of what makes us much more than merely sentient.   Alas, there are also transient feelings which gatecrash this party of lifelong-commitments. Because beneath the veneer of manicured gardens are also wild roses desperate to break free. Because relationships are intrinsically a riddle of staying tied and breaking free, of committing and struggling to keep commitments, of staying steady to a promise and getting drunk to a vision. Is it the challenge of a temptation or the end of a search? Is it a conflict you are searching for, or an existential crisis our heart is seeking to resolve? We are lucky if our promise to ourselves, to a loved one, also brings in a concomitant connect which evolves, is elastic to change, sensitive to conflict, kind to intransigence.   There’s always the reality of returning home. Or the wreckage we leave in the wake of our uncertain hearts. In a world where nothing is fixed, we seem like perpetrators, but often are no more than victims.   In a world of  shifting loyalties and drifting moral codes, of seeking ways to fill the holes in our souls, of deciding to live in half-lights of incomplete satisfaction, in places of permanent twilight under the summer noon, we find the best ways to find love and life.  We are lucky if we  get it on first strike, or we remain seekers - whether we finally drift or not.   In a relationship crumbing to touch, irrespective of what we do with our body, we have already drifted  - our hearts have found nooks to rest, our thoughts have found spaces to withdraw, for a promise made we have already compromised with the only life we have been bestowed.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on transience and drift: Favourite People (who we love and leave) Letting Go (A Childhood Song) No Revolution is Complete Without a Ruined Soul 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Rookie by Phat SoundsFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11661-rookieLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Unrevealed to us, the universe is working for us. Like master chefs will have you bite into something bitter before bringing in a sweet savoury, life will spin out the worst  - only to balance it out in mysterious ways.   It’s my firm belief that if we are open with all our senses  to our inner beings and the world outside, we will capture the subtle genuflection of the universe’s grace. It could be the sudden advent of an astringent odour from childhood, it could be the perfect amalgam of rain and a heart-aching tune coming out from a window, it could be the touch of a hand as you feel an evening’s loneliness grow in you, it could be a flower crumbling and falling in front of your eyes almost crying “Witness me”.   And we see this, and we absorb it all, and immediately put it into a context as minutiae which gives us intimations of the universe. And we are not alone, with our grief, our struggle, our desires, our disappointments. We are no longer alone. Our hidden sorrow is counterbalanced by a secret smile, our emptiness is filled by the fullness of someone’s joy bursting to fill the world.   Even in the worst of the times, we need to have the explorer mind, because riches abound in the world, and are often found at the precipice of  arduousness and the inflection point of ardor. The universe balances everything out.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how life often means stopping to experience it: This: One Grace One Morning, the Ants A Garden of Departures Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Shadows Of Autumn [Full version] by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11652-shadows-of-autumn-full-versionLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I see young people together, in love, in lust, lost, planning an event, a day or a life, and I see impatience, I see the desire for appropriation. I see conclusions rather than drifting coffee aroma, I see hard closed city alleys rather than coastlines lazily disappearing into beautiful haze. I see uncomfortable hiatuses, wounded silences, I see complaints where there should be enquiries. I see good times as planned methods instead of uncapped madnesses.   My heart breaks to see ordinariness being discounted so deeply. Nobody likes a small life, but nobody can ignite the heart without seeing light glisten in a raindrop. And why is it so difficult to let life unfold in its uncomplicated munificence instead of trying to continually force its hand? There’s only so much that the heart or a life can manufacture, as the machinery will be wrenched and what will come out will maim.   Let each other be free, I say, let the other fail. In the frailty will lie the kernel of the strength of what both of you will mean to each other. Beyond pretense, beyond the need for proof, beyond the desire to make a point.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how small things can be so big in our lives: Living in a World Deficient in Hugs My Mother is Full of Water and Ready for Sonography One Morning, The Ants 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.   Following is the music used in this episode -   Music: Summer Morning [Full version] by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11262-summer-morning-full-versionLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   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

I remember the story of a bunch of strangers taking shelter under a tree on a stormy night. They could see bolts of lightning falling all around and charring trees. They looked around and saw that they were all high caste Brahmins except for one poor simpering low caste Sudra, who could suddenly see all eyes on him. One particularly arrogant Brahmin pointed his finger at him and said “He is the one who will bring us bad fortune!” And in a flash he was thrown out into the storm, above all entreaties. The poor man ran into the forest, soaked to the skin, looking for some other shelter. And right then, a bolt of lightning fell on that tree and all the high caste Brahmins were charred to death. It was actually the Sudra’s presence which was protecting them all.   I remember this story every time my loved one and I have a tiff. The commonness of daily life chips away at the magic of bonds inexorably. Plus life extends far beyond our most primary relationships: the hours of a day are appurtenant to the time we spend with them. There is so much more which goes on in our lives over and above one relationship. And we need to keep floating through those also, so we come out of them richer, unscathed, protected.   And in the ups and downs of my trajectory in the world, I know I’m protected because of her. How do I know? I know it in my bones. I know it because of the purity she brings into us - her unrelenting unapologetic unstinting stand beside me, the unblemished crystal of presence, the absoluteness of her continuing forgiveness. She is nature’s inexorability -  just as the sun finds its way every morning, just the way a bud bursts in spite of not being noticed - in spite of everything, she never leaves my side when it matters. She is inexhaustible - when I’m about to give up she somehow transfers her energy, her very being to me, and is luminescent in spite of being empty. So much of our lives needs to be spent in utter gratefulness - the inexhaustible supply of grace which we encounter, is enough to put us forever into the universe’s debt.   But nature  has simplified it for us - we just need to look out for that one magical person - and know where our universe resides.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems about those who are just that much more special: I Fell In Love With You (Again) Beside The Tin of Sardines As We Meet Again At The End of The Day Gather Me 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Adventure by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6092-adventureLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

There was an incredible experiment done years back where children were put into two batches - one where they were out in the care of nurses who cuddled and hugged and caressed them regularly. And in the other batch none of the nurses cuddled the infants. They were efficient but cold, caretakers not care givers. And they tracked the children as they grew. The results were startling to say the least - the former children grew up to be be emotionally stable and balanced kids, and the other batch had children who didn’t fit, and often turned out to be disruptive and rowdy.   The truth of the experiment has not diminished, and it’s truth has been revealed time and again to not be restricted to infants only. If nothing else, it’s importance has increased manifold in today’s manic world, where nobody has time for anybody. And in our rush for deadlines and accomplishments, we forget that our souls require nourishment which is often found in such humdrum things as companionship and embrace, attention and listening. Small physicalities like a hug, a caress, a kiss, often do more to well-being than any medicine can.   Seers of all ages have mulled over questions of life and purpose, and time and again have come to the conclusion that all that we achieve is often of no meaning if our lives is bereft of human connection. Because rewards lose their glamour, we as people lie diminished, if we are not able to externalize the ecstasy inside us. Just as grief lies reduced when spoken about, joy multiples on sharing.   And in that small homily lies the kernel of the final fulfilment a person can seek - or get.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the power of touch: Gather Me This: One Grace She Held His Hand As He Drifted 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.   Following is the music used in this episode -   Music: Liberty Quest by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/293-liberty-questLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: The Way To Kataka by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11-the-way-to-katakaLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Finally life is only about choices. The quality of our life depends on it. And that applies first to what our reactions are, and then to what our actions are. Because much of what we do is in anticipation of or in response to what we think people will think. The subset to this is the overriding power of our ego - what it makes us feel, what it makes us look like in this world. The need to feel acknowledged, the distress when we are not.   The tragedy inherent in the situation is that we live an inauthentic life, lit for someone else’s gratification, engendered for someone who actually couldn’t care.   And slowly we sink in a morass where we lose sight of what we truly are. We start believing our own lies. In fact our lies become our crutches to walk through the world  - shiny and empty, praised outwardly but scorned on the sidelines, touchy to feedback, inured to truth.   The tragedy of what it entails is that we seek low lights to surround us,  so our dim brightness shines like a floodlight, and we consider ourselves as resplendent.   And we live in this well of penumbra, thinking we’ve conquered the world. Celebrating life, singularly unaware that we are dancing on a cemetery of our own dreams.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on choices and how we make them: I Will Leave The Last Line For You to Fill Aaschi - a promise If I Commit Suicide 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.   Following is the music used in this episode -\   Music: Abschied (Romeos Erbe) by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3148-abschied-romeos-erbeLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: BRIO 1 by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/232-brio-1Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I try hard not to be cynical. But I think that’s my terrible gift to myself. Life had a hand to play (of course!), bringing me people and platitudes in equal measure, to leave me nicely acidic for a lifetime. Not that I don’t fight against my worst instincts, read tomes to learn how to return to a crystal-clear state of trust and welcome, a kind of knowing innocence, measured but complete in itself. But it’s easier said than done. As the entirety of my being screams “Alert!” whenever I see a good deed being done. ‘What’s in it for him?’ is the instinctive response. It’s almost as if I’m done with believing there is anything which is simply selfless, guileless, truly giving.   And then I stop myself and think - how can I be chained to a thinking where nothing is lost and nothing is gained, but oh I pay such a cost! Go to hell with Sophocles who said “Trust dies but mistrust blossoms “.  I want, again and again, to be the fool who gets fooled daily, hurt hourly, and the injured soul who has to be picked up drunk from the narrow alley every night. But be the one who doesn’t lose hope in humanity even as friends lie, colleagues use, relatives conspire and outsiders ingratiate.   It’s better to die innocent with one’s heart full of the sky then bitterly, much before the universe closes in.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the travails of growing old: Memory Keeper Ruins Have Permanent Flames 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: Melodic Interlude Two by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6394-melodic-interlude-twoLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

This is a thought which has haunted me time and again. I have done, thought, engendered, perpetrated things which I know are not me, at least what I’ve thought of as the actual me, the essence of me. Things have happened unthinkingly, impulsively, reflexively, without the intervention of what I call my better senses.   Then I reason -  all my instinctive reactions and actions have come out of me hence they are as much me as the better ones. If my better senses have a home inside me then so do the worst of my instincts - and what’s the use of denying the fact. And I lie bemused and ashamed.   I console myself - overall I’m not a bad person.   So here’s what I do. Even inside the furtiveness  of my secrets I try to seek a balance. Kindness over revelation, pause before thought, acceptance over recrimination. And I realise the impossibility of changing things which don’t wish to be changed. And I slowly accept that reality. And in that acceptance is the seed of peace.   We only have ourselves to understand and change. And because of that the universe will come and show us another path, if there is something inside us which wants it. There is then no need to change anything else.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on introspecting on life and times: The Grace That We Give Compatriots of Trust If I Commit Suicide 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.   Following is the music used in this episode - Music: AnotherDramaticScene by Lilo SoundFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6137-anotherdramaticsceneLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

One of the tragedies of growing older is how we see more and more people pass on, even as we wait for our own mortality to kick in. Surviving loved ones is not a blessing, as we find lesser number of breaths intertwined with ours, and our hours spent in longer days.   There are several people I remember with great tenderness. Along the years the particularities have started to fade. The slant of a smile, the squelching of eyes, the way some words got spoken, the firmness of a hand on a shoulder, the moments a hug lasted. Lines of a face start fading, we forget when we last laughed, what we last said - what we regretfully didn’t. The only thing which remains with clarity is the glow their memory evokes, the smile which comes when I think of them, and the lump which forms in my throat, when tears start to flow unabashedly.   As the years add up, and death seems more a reality than a concept, I hope even if my life doesn’t engender any remembrance, at least, to whoever who thinks of me, they find themselves filled with a glow, even if it is as small as a flame.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the grief and tribulation of passing on - She Held His Hand As He Drifted When Breath Becomes Air What Do I Leave Behind Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   Following is the music used in this episode -   Music: Flying Penguins by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6-flying-penguinsLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Games Of Octopi by Tim KuligFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9831-games-of-octopiLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Karma is destiny’s calling. The smiles and bruises we give, troop back to us in (as the famous Gladiator once said) this birth or the next. (Likely to be this, as I’ve seen God getting to be progressively more impatient). The things we twist, the generosities we quietly lay out like sunlight, the hypocrisies we ooze in our sanctimonious smiles - we might not get our just desserts in this birth but we are definitely found out and scorned for what we really are.   The belief has, I must confess, given me satisfaction whenever I have encountered the worst of humanity and not been able to do much about it. But much more than the illusory future retribution, I have seen life come by with its lessons and lesions in ways too subtle, too meaningful to brush away.   A rampaging mean lying boss who gets a son who steadily gets to become the same. The deep conjugal misery of an acquaintance who only has a warped opinion of everyone. A serial adulterer who has health problems galore. I see cause and effect everywhere. Friends say I’m giving logic the widest  canvas possible, and life anyway has these instances of good fortune/bad fortune, heartache and woe in the normal course of life. Of course it does. But grant me my satisfaction.   But the greater imperative is the multiplier effect of all that we do. The universe we inhabit is far more sensitive and absorbing of what we say and do. We don’t always realise it, but our nature is also prone to go viral - things we say, things we do, and not only when there is extreme good or extreme vileness. And simply by being ourselves, we affect people around us, who in turn touch the senses of those whose lives they touch, and so on and so forth. Without realising things change, because of us.   And thus the good we do finds a way back to us. Nothing beautiful we have achieved has ever happened in splendid isolation. We are plugged into the sensory ether of the universe, and there are waves which carry us up - and it’s the infinite grace of our doing which takes us to places which we wouldn’t even conceive of reaching.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the mystery of karma and life: Tenderness in the Pause This: One Grace Aaschi: a promise 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.   Following is the music used in this episode -   Music: Village Ambiance by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6586-village-ambianceLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Army Of The Dead by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10276-army-of-the-deadLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Growing up, and the art of doing nothing. How I wish I was again sure of the former and a master of the latter. Because I’ve lived years, often without experiencing anything new, and fill my time - and myself - so much that there is no place left to give wings to my choices or desires.   I still remember the days when I naturally knew what was important -  reading, and thinking about what I  read; talking, and then letting long silences puncture my words; of waking up, and watching a random tree outside my window sway; of sitting at the dining table, of mum waxing eloquent about a new technique of soil petrification, and dad taking a spoonful and saying “This is good”, and a silence descending, punctured only by the sounds of blissful chewing. The choices were simpler, and unbeknownst to us, we were creating nooks for return, for solace.   In our tumbling, involved worlds now, we are heroes of the rote, progenitors of the already parsed, masters of the cliched, slaves to the routine. We don’t change rhythms, we don’t stop on the way to the office, we have an iron grip on whom we meet, we are shy for the new, we are afraid of the unobvious. In the immensity of possibilities, we pick a few strands and tie our world with them - and think it’s gift-wrapped.   A friend wrote in, when a poem from 9 years back popped up on her Facebook feed - “I miss those times of poetry, conversations, simplicity.” A flood of pleasure ran through me just thinking of those days. It’s easy to say that we’d moved on (the truth), it’s useless to say “let’s return” because we can’t. Every time is a different time, and we are in many ways different people - what connected us then was that magical alchemy of time which presented us with the plain brass of time which we turned into pure gold. Nothing can bring back that transition - yes, because it was that - as the rabbit hole of life is always destined to take us somewhere else.   Nostalgia is a bitch, but it serves a purpose. It reminds us that what is valuable to our memory is because that time was particularly lived in. It brings into our sensibilities the need to immerse ourselves into the ride and stop chasing shadows. To experience the leakages of time as the stream to slip on, to try not to multiply moments into meaning.   And minutiae becomes life - to give your sister’s hair time enough to grow, to let things pass such that the first wrinkle does appear on your mother’s face, to let our father’s laughter resound like echo inside us long after it’s last note has drifted, to let flowers float and be grounded.   In our realisation of the drift of time, lies the possibility of it becoming permanent parts of our being.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joy and tribulations of growing up: Letting Go (a childhood song) When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train 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.   Following is the music used in this episode -   Music: Weightless by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightlessLicense: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Music: Endless Expanses by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9124-endless-expansesLicense: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Our relationship to our mothers is a supple thing. Day to day, year to year, age to age, it changes. Beyond the evolutionary grounding, beyond the nurturing necessities, we are an amalgam of the obvious and the extraordinary. To be gifted the kind of unprecedented unflinching support we do get from mothers is a benediction of nature. Our steady rejection of it, and her holding tight to the tethers, is the obvious unravelling which this relationship goes through - her instinct becomes a need, the child’s need for her transitions to become a burden.   And then there’s an inflexion point when things come to a head. Often in the teens, often later - it doesn’t matter when. What does matter is that it’s almost a rebellion of a kind. Things start breaking down as if everything was fragile to begin with, as if the relationship was nothing more than that of a food-provider and laundry-doer. And the tie is suddenly fraught with the consequences of unreconciled pain.   Succour is often found elsewhere.   And therein often lies the genesis of the fracture - the bird seeks to fly out of the nest, but the nester is still not done with the chick.   But relationships are both the present and the unravelling. A lot of its pain is the passage, though it’s joy is retrospective. And though we might be nostalgic as we look back, we might actually have come out through a long tunnel of pain. But in spite of all its rockiness, a mother remains a symbol of our breath. The sooner we let that one thought overshadow everything else, we would have let ourselves understand the meaning of the most meaningful relationship in our life.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on our times with our mothers: Mother's Rambling Lessons on Life Imparted in Morning Walks in My Childhood My Mother's Lines How Mothers Are Nature's Return Gifts 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: AnotherDramaticScene by Lilo SoundFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6137-anotherdramaticsceneLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Rain, amongst all seasons, is as much feeling as occurrence. In spite of all its deleterious effects - on roads, homes, countries - log-jammed lanes, traffic jams, leaky roofs, economic devastations! - it can never be bereft of its poetry, it’s memory of growing pangs, it’s matte occurrences of comfort, tea and satisfying dissatisfactions.   Everyone has a rain-infused remembrance. The peerless newsletter ‘The Nook’ had a get-together to reminisce about people and their memories of rains -   “One (of the participants) brought with them the rains of Kerala, with their many names and each a peculiar character.   Another told us of the monsoons in the hills, of mothers and grandmothers climbing concrete roofs and fixing them while children hold buckets and gather stones that roll off.   We shared stories of running across paddy fields, our feet tickling; tales of a small family on a three-wheeler devouring patties that we too could taste in our mouths.   We were transported to a bustling street in Delhi brought to its knees by the rain. We became kids floating paper boats in puddles, lovers stealing a kiss in the backseat while the driver’s distracted by the romance of the windshield wipers and the rain.”   Indeed! For lovers, the rains are the perfect playlist.   Gentle, harsh, insistent, soothing. The world inside finds a rhythm with the world outside. Being inside a time when time doesn’t matter is life’s finest benediction, one which lovers embrace with casual ease, knowing, possibly for the first time in their lives, that the world can wait.   And that then is the bittersweet legacy of the monsoons. Of being so close to life that thereafter it doesn’t matter - and then to immediately lose that lesson. In living through the rains, we are filled to the brim with both life’s grace and possibilities. If only we let the aftermath be a continuum.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the romance of rain: Bringing the Storm Home Dancing in the Rains Making Love in a Church on a Stormy Day 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: Parting of the Ways - Part 2 by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4196-parting-of-the-ways-part-2License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Who are we, if not people who live on hope, thought to thought, day to day, year to year. Often knowing about possibilities, often just whistling in the wind. It could be a change of fortune, a lucky break, a chance encounter, a person we’d always loved. Everything, even what seems to be the minutest of an incident, has the potential to change lives, and more often than not, it does.   And until it does, hope binds us to invisible tethers.   Gurus talk about yearning, as they talk about the journey, and remind us not to lose the experience of what we go through.   To know that the journey of feelings is often more precious than what we finally get.   The untetheredness of anguish, the ecstasy of possibility, the world building, the smart turn of phrase, the laughter, the look, the sheer joy of something which could only be defined as tender. That is the road to finally getting something. Heartbreakingly , and retrospectively, when we finally get - what we wanted, who we wanted, how we wanted - it is often bereft of glory. Compared to the striving, what we finally get seems so much lesser - less glittering, less flawless, less satisfying.   And thus go things in life, and thus do love stories find their beginnings, their middles and their ends. Too many affairs end at the consummation. And it would be a tragedy to have that as the only remembrance - and not the tease and the expectation and the imagination and the excessive giving and the extravagance leading towards it all.   And because of that, every story stands stunted, it’s rich repository of the best of what we human beings are capable of lying discarded with a sheen of regret, as if it meant for nothing. When the truth is that this is what we actually live for.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the urgings and yearning: Miles Apart Gather Me Aaschi (a promise) 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: Odyssee by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/56-odysseeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The bane of my life has been my memory. I forget. I forget prodigiously. Names, faces, conversations. Don’t even get me to started on dates and numbers, groan. In office, at home, I struggle with narrating incidents, at remembering places, things we saw and ate at specific places.   I had a girl who worked for me who, after a decade, still remembered the make of the shirt and the colour of socks I’d worn when I’d first interviewed her.   I guess there are bigger tragedies in life (people are still dying hungry!), but more than a patchy whitewash of remembrance, this creates a strange spiritual hole in me, which I carry as regret inside me.   But on the flip side, I have also forgotten grievances and regrets, I forget details of battles,  I’ve forgotten details of when friends had tried to pull fast ones on me, the pain some had left, the times I’d weeped into the night because words had hurt. I’d forgotten the details, soon I’d forgotten who’d said or done what.   Forgetfulness then is just another way for forgiveness.    But there are deeper cuts.   I’ve forgotten details of the afternoon when my son was born, I’ve forgotten the look on my dad’s face (ecstatic I’m told) when I’d passed my first professional exams. Or my mother’s hug (unending, I’m told) when she held the first copy of my first book. I’ve forgotten words spoken softly to me, poems written for me, silences I’ve shared, the memories of hands held in crowded rooms, playing the fool, the hi jinks.   The entirety of what is gone is like a lost country of reminiscence.   And that hurts.   What then remains is an existential mystery, where I pathetically flounder inside the lost meadows of my own heart. My happiness itself seems ragged and pockmarked and I walk around within a permanent cave of dissatisfaction.   I wish sometime I would have a memory keeper, like the old royalty had - someone doing a record-keeping celestially or by being beside me.   This poem is then a seeking of a blessing,  a gently yearning desire to remember, and if that’s not possible, have someone I  love to remember for me.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hauntings of memory: Letting Go (a childhood song) The Passing of Autumn When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train 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: Relaxation [instrumental, sounds of birds] by Edvardas SenFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10002-relaxation-instrumental-sounds-of-birdsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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!   We are what we are. But we are also all the people who have arrived, moved on, stayed in our lives. People whose very touch may feel like a hug or an abandonment , a benediction or a scare. People we’ve loved  and fought with, people we’ve been secretive about, those we’ve cried for, those who’ve cried because of us. Just as relationships change, we are changeable too.   We are what we are. But we are also the slipstream of our old loves, the undercurrent of those who hurt us, the flotsam of those we wronged. We are also the pressed flowers of compliments, kept long after the fragrance has gone; we are the lees of the good times which make us remember springs and mists; we are the dregs of the nights of short tempers and long knives.   There is so much that is extraordinary in mundane lives, that one wonders what is evanescent and what stays. Would the quiet moment in a sun drop count? Would a poem which made me cry stay? Would the fleeting memory of a summer love still overwhelm after years?   How does memory work? Is it a crucible or a sieve? Does it hold what it does to keep it shimmering and intact for an insignificant day? Or does it let everything percolate down into a cesspool of oblivion, just keeping back those morsels which then find place in our souls.   Every one of us then is an amalgam of the dullness and magic of every person we meet, every feeling we feel, every hurt we give, every bruise we carry. We are never merely the wind and the woods, the street and the home - we are also the stars, the black holes, the pulsars  - we are the whole universe.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on resolving relationships  - I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy Capturing The Feeling  Stories Which Survive Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Music: Rising Sun by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/86-rising-sunLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de

I have always wondered about those who are in love and stay cities away from each other, and colleagues who are ready to stay apart for their careers. And I’m gobsmacked at how they make it happen. I’ve asked several of them about it, and the answer is always accompanied by a sigh and the answer “Life.” As if what determined their choices was something out of their control. Which was of course both true and not true.   But I was more interested in how they made it happen? How they kept their feelings of tenderness and care alive, how did they show their best and their worst to each other, how could they bridge the gap of physicality and touch  - all the ingredients which are so essential for a relationship to breathe and exist.   Can sulking have the same impact across zoom? How can kissing on phone substitute for the real thing? Without a body beside you, do you slowly start preferring your solitary conquering of the bed? Whom do you turn to when nightmares or worse crises hit you? Do you discover that an empty home has teeth and too many dark corners?   Does a conjoined love story finally find its own solitary life story?   It is easy to promise to each other that you are the start and the end of a tie, that when the moonbeam hits the pillow beside yours you are filled with an ache which just doesn’t go. Because distances erode. Because nothing can substitute the look of an eye, the deep hidden ring of a guffaw, the comfort and continuing thrill of a safe and familiar touch. We are finally physical people, who flower in presence - there is one sun in the sky to fill the world with its nourishment but one in our lives to fill us with the glow and nurture so essential for our souls.   However much our hearts are full of what we mean for each other, there’s a point where our yearning will ask a question - and with great chagrin we will discover that the answers are no longer clear.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the difficulties of relationships  - Love (then) Is Also Patience I Should Have Loved More Wisely (they say) 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 following music was used for this media project:Music: Memories by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8554-memoriesLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Agency! Agency! That’s what people would say - women lack agency, that self-respect, which would allow them to accept no nonsense from their partners. Violence? Infidelity? These were lines which once crossed were unretractable, unforgivable.   But women do the unthinkable - they scream and shout, but they also forgive, they also stay on. And in that one decision seems to lie embodied their helplessness, as they sacrifice their intrinsic force, jettison their innate power, lay down their weaponry  without stepping into the fighting ring.   Or - is that true?   Are these the contradictions which women of our age display - strong in peacetime, weak in battle? Brilliant in picking out the diamonds, floundering in the play in the dirt?    But here’s the catch - are they ironically being stronger for it?   Because when you step back, and look at people like you would look at stars - with both wonder and perspective - you realise that maybe, maybe, it all matters so little. Foibles are weaknesses, the one who is beautiful in body is often the weakest in spirit, that however gnarled the deed, human beings are also intrinsically gorgeous. That from a past fraught with conflict, there comes a realisation of the most soul-searching kind.  That in the universe of people, there are bound to be hurtling comets along with the stars, out of control, with strange inner workings, but who also might be gentle souls, whose generosity makes them leave their light behind, long after they are gone.   And through the pain of being taken for granted, of being cheated, of facing inequities, there is a dawn of realisations and reconciliations. Because people change. Because couched in the worst of us, often lies our most vulnerable parts which might be the reason for what we do. For when people crack, often it lets out the acid, venom and bile which was poisoning everything inside, by accumulating without any way to run out.   People change. There are multiple dawns inside them. And reincarnations. There’s so much which burns up and burns out. They are often destroyed before they re-emerge as the best versions of what they always were but did not - maybe could not - show.   Often there is no patience for this, often no scope, no width, no chance. Often the tidal waves of distress and pain of loved ones are enough to inundate whole lives. It’s a valid reaction. They are consumed by circumstances. And find their best selves compromised by the worst their partners can show.   Maybe, maybe, that is fine too.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on truth and untruths -  The Truth of Lies Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys How She Knew (that he was unfaithful) 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: Atlantis by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8784-atlantisLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

It’s so easy to say that trust is absolute. That what is trustworthy has to be fully so, or not at all. In the grey complexities of life, it’s both the toughest give and often an unreasonable ask.   Humans are fragile, they are also duplicitous. They lie, betray a trust of years, but are ironically ready to lay their lives on line when it comes to things they care for - and for those whose very trust they may have betrayed. Ensconced in the biggest tragedy of human nature often lies it’s gold mine. Because if there’s one truth which sustains our relationships and keeps things afloat is our changeability, our evolution. We learn, we relearn, as life goes on we rediscover priorities, within our wounds we find the kernel of redemption.   But the tragedy lies with the victims, the ones whose trust is betrayed. Because they lie injured, hurt, their belief in tatters, and their very core shaken. For them to go back to a more pristine time in such a relationship is asking for the impossible. How can such a person ever trust again? And that is where we have to steel ourselves.   When I stand in front of someone who has betrayed me, these are the two thoughts I hold inside. Will my trust be again forsaken? Can I be the same again with this person? Time will tell. But I will force myself to give it a shot. I will set up a personal ecosystem of  forgiveness and communication. And I have the company of author Maya Angelou, who in her inimitably gentle and forthright way said “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”   But author Shannon L Adler said something very revealing years back which I haven’t forgotten  - “People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.”  I have held that thought as close to my heart as I have Jesus’s exhortation “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone.”   Life's navigation through trust issues thus find its granular path to resolution.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on things which wound our souls  - If I Commit Suicide Finding Ways to Survive (Each Other) No Revolution is Complete Without a Ruined Soul 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: Weightless by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightlessLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

If I commit suicide, it will be on a happy day. I would wrap the day as efficiently as I would wrap my life. Instructions clear, bank accounts safe, investments earmarked. I would make your favourite dish (stuffed aubergine with sun dried tomatoes), serve it with garlic bread, call in your favourite ice cream (Jamoca Almond Fudge) and have a glass of chianti on the side, as you look on in wonder. I would watch you with pleasure as the sun sets and fills you with its glow.   In the end, I would have attempted to give you what neither you nor I could give each other - care. Oh, I am not fussing the good things, which we performed with discipline - we would always end our days with our duty to each other completed to perfection.   But we would also be - polite but insidious, thoughtful but sarcastic: we would hollow each other, tired of figuring out each other’s metaphors.   For we had become proficient in knowing what hurt both of us, as we talked of making sense and losing our minds. We always thought we would find love right in front of each other, preordained, either as a beginning or as a finality, but instead we found storms brewing in living rooms and broken teacups in the backyards.   What is it about ordinary lives that it’s intimations of helplessness are far more severe than the defeat of a cherished dream?   Thought by thought, remark by remark, word by word, we were chipped, alienated, distanced. Until we were frightened of ourselves, doubtful of our very place in the universe, and felt undeserving of the sheltering skies or the unquestioning beauty of the world.   There’s so much I will miss. Stories of others where they’d found the meaning which had always eluded me, empty chairs left behind after the music was over and we overflowed, the slant of flower-laden boughs as they smiled and encroached into my walk, the careless spread of broken blossoms lying as inspiration, the warm glow of evenings without chatter or insistences.   But then it would all be overlaid with the intonations of familiar voices as they slowly entangled me as aural nooses. That’s when I knew it was time.   It would be appropriate that I would leave so serenely, as my entire life has been an exercise in evolving quietly in the backyards of my own despair, so much so that I would bleed and I myself would not know.   Who says suicide is drama where the protagonist doesn’t know the end? I know. I know you will break, you will be inconsolable - but not irreparable. You are strong and practical. And you will find solace in my note which would unequivocally say it was not your fault. That it was my choice, my choice alone. You will be massively inconvenienced but not irreconcilably. You will regret my guts to give in fatally and finally  to my anguish - after all, we had our own happy metre to figure out who made the other more melancholic.   I will probably play Maksim’s Hana’s Eyes,  as I would lie back and let my life leave me behind as a shell without any sense of presence. I was always a murmur, I will leave as a whisper.   I hope I will finally come home to me.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on death and its redemptions  - When Breath Becomes Air The Things We Become When We Leave What Do I Leave Behind Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The following music was used for this media project:Music: Heart Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Sunset at Glengorm by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4437-sunset-at-glengormLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

It’s one of the ironies of life that we spend more time searching for what’s wrong and flawed in those we love than on the pleasure their presence provides us. We are crotchety with praise. We could be pillows or doors for them, we could be their skies or their earth, their truth when they require it, their boost, their grace, their heft.  We forget they are breathing masses of soul, liable to be torn, likely to bleed. That they need to be embraced more often then turned away from.   And I wonder why are we like this?   Why are we hard, unrelenting, unkind, with those who deserve the best we can give, the finest of what makes us loveable and liveable. Is it something in the bones of our species that we hold ourselves back - see danger first, untruth, a selfish play, a ploy? Instead of belief and warmth, we first walk through the ugly and the unlovable. It’s almost as if we are going towards something which would put us into a path of perdition/engulf us with distrust, as if we expected it, almost wanted it. That is how strong our primordial instinct to be wary is. And we are ready to be hurt, we want to be proven that people are the worst versions of themselves, irrespective of how we might have been otherwise. Cynicism it seems is hardwired into our DNA.   And in that one tragic bent of thought, we lose the gold-flecking possibilities in our relationships.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems about the places we consider home  - Finally Home A Home As An Open Dream Rediscovering Heaven 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: Medieval Love by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9366-medieval-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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!   "Come. Come softly. Come when the heat of noon has still not dimmed. Come when the streets have stopped asking questions. Come when the world has left its own care to us. Come."   In anticipation lies a whole universe. In the waiting lies the shape, the sound, the colour, the contour of beauty.   In a world strewn with disappointments, of truths with no spine, and lies with fashionable make-up on, often the only solace lies in the wonder and the dream. And particularly in love, anticipation is often the beginning, the glue, and the end. Particularly, as we wait...   Because in that hiatus of restless emptiness, our heart and mind have conversations, nay, battles. There are questions asked, doubts raised, admonishments given. With great rapidity, joy and misery tumble around in a struggle for supremacy - there’s nothing real, but everything seems real. We dread excuses, we anticipate excuses, we destroy excuses.   In a span of few moments - minutes - which have the jaggedness  of hours, hearts are deciphered, conclusions are drawn, decisions are hewn into stony consciousness. But everything seems fragile.   And then the wait finishes. The nervousness melts. Questions are unquestioned. Answers no longer require stilts. There is light. There is air. Before it all ends, there is life.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on conundrums of life  - What Do I Leave Behind? In The Darkness of Our Autobiographies The Complex Algorithms of Giving 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 - Heart Love by MusicLFilesLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

People who are permanent fixtures in our lives still have that unique ability to make happiness spring upon us. It could be something big like a surprise party, or it could be something infinitesimally small like quietly following you to the mall so you could then have a quick happy moment over coffee. Loved ones know how to pull in disparate threads of our being, and weave an ordinary but extraordinary hour out of it, the way we gather the scattered beams of dusk and find a quiet sanctuary in it.   These slivers we steal from our daily routines are the ones which give meaning to life. Business, work, our daily responsibilities are what give us a means to live, to find a place in society which often defines us with what we do, but the private time we can steal to be with a loved one, the visit we make to an art gallery on the way back home, the poem we write as an overflow to a haunting of the night, the music we turn to when we seek answers - these are things which give meaning to our existence.   Time and again, whenever I have sat back and thought of the times which would probably flash through my mind in the last seconds of my existence, they are invariably the seemingly meaningless ones - standing at the window watching the setting sun reflect on the ponds beside my house, seeing a TikTok video together and laughing uncontrollably, reading something moving and sharing it immediately whilst glowing inside to have added a dollop of sunlight into someone’s ordinary day, talking quietly about how much we miss someone we’d loved with equal immensity, seeing a painting together and then turning to see tears in each other’s eyes. The memory of happiness on each others faces when we meet after a long parting, the sound of her voice saying “I will take care, don’t worry.”   People sometimes tell me they haven’t taken a holiday for years, and I silently wonder - haven’t they gone back to a loved one every night?   The things which enrich us are often the things we label as ‘boring’ - before we know what’s better.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems about people we are lucky to have in our lives   - As we Meet Again At The End of The Day This : One Grace The Comfort of Her Being 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: Open Sea (Piano) by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9420-open-sea-pianoLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Relaxation 3 by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9629-relaxation-3License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Come evening, I am breathless to come home. Nearer I get, faster the knots in my shoulders ease.  I turn my car into the driveway, a few floors below you, and start to forget what I thought I would carry as an elongated wound of the day.    I think we make too much of the world’s tribulations and deprivations, as if we are amidst the most dire times of all centuries put together, straining to find equilibrium again. We both carry enough balm in the history of our sharing, to self-heal.   I know you would have already unburdened yourself of your day, to be light for me. I enter the glow of our home. You are in your favourite chair, your feet tucked under yourself, your phone at a 45 degree angle as you read your book on it. You look up and give a small secret smile which only I am able to see. I know I’m inside a perfect moment.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the unexpected tenderness which ordinary days bring to us  - Tenderness In The Pause This : One Grace 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: Cheezy Piano Medley by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4833-cheezy-piano-medleyLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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

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

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

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

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

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

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' 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

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

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

I have often looked at couples who are so different from each other that together they seem to move like oil and water.  And then I blink and look again, and I see a strange alchemy at work - a layering more than a blending, stitched crochet then a cocktail, a sun-entrenched day than smog. And they progressively look like a gorgeously-knitted piece of warm-wear together.   How do people who seem to have nothing in common get attracted to each other, and then find that balance which is the merging of maps and diversities? How do heaven and earth meet?   It’s simplistic to say that if someone loves talking, the perfect match is the person who is a great listener. Or the aggressive one needs the calm presence beside her. Habits can be nature, but they need nurturing to be character. And people who gravitate towards each other do so because something in them has transcended the constraints of skin-deep deterrents and found something subtler inside to connect to.   A poet might then be drawn to the accountant, because both recognise they are artistes, merely writing on different media. An actress can then be seduced easily by the sportsman because both revel in the creative and the risky. The social butterfly might love the slow retiring kind because she finds her resting space in him. The ties which bind have roots deep in the chemistry of our beings.     Contrasts also gravitate towards each other to fill unseen emptinesses inside. The man tongue-tied and tied up because of being shut up throughout his life is completely blown away by the brazen and the bold. The woman surrounded 24 hours in a vortex of talk, energy and confusion will plunge headlong into a man who seems to be an ocean of calmness and gravitas. Often such contrasts turn out to be false manifestations of shallow beings, and the bond crumbles in the face of revelations. But when it conjoins into a fulfilment of what a true seeker finds, it is like a holy union, an alliance made in heaven.   Angelita Lim said "I saw that you were perfect, and so I loved you. Then I saw that you were not perfect and I loved you even more." Maybe, then, the dynamics of relationships are the universe’s tease, it’s magic to make life an exhilarating and often unexpected trip.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ironies of love: The Comfort of Her Being Infinite Tenderness The 101 of How To Praise (someone you 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 following music was used for this media project:Music: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4533-toccata-and-fugue-in-d-minorLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license The following music was used for this media project:Music: Passage Of Time by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10005-passage-of-timeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Don’t we complicate our lives too much? With our desire for more, and then for much more, for affirmations, and then reaffirmations. For a continuous acknowledgment that not only do we matter, but - that we matter more than anybody else. It’s not enough to be together; we want words which confirm that our togetherness matters. We want cards, messages, heart-shaped emojis, birthday presents, outings, likes to our posts. Things which can be seen or talked about. Our feelings can’t only be felt, they need to take the route of the tangible. We exist in a  chaos of desire. And. In the process, ignoring, time and again,  what comes unobtrusively, on soft padded paws, in ways which often can’t be seen - but can always be felt, if we only stop to breathe and notice, Both of you quietly reading your own books, as she slowly slides onto your shoulder into sleep. She working on her desk on a Sunday, and you walking upto the door, checking her out, and leaving quietly. Both of you listening to the same music, one AirPod each. Holding hands because they are there to be held. Looking at the same painting for long minutes and then turning to find that both of you have tears in your eyes. Turning back in the middle of a fight into a hug. In our litany of anguish we are often in search of redemption, but stay to linger in wounds. So how do we acknowledge tough times? By not bothering her when her brows are knitted, to not admonish him when things go wrong, to listen (really listen) when he complains, to be a weathervane to moods, to be grateful for the good times and see one’s being fill up with grace. The little things, the smallest littlest things. To be alive to their possibility and their manifestation. To know that if you have to think about the last day of your life, it would be no more, and no less, than spending time with both your feet out in the sun, dozing sporadically, but her hand in yours, and talking of what passes as feelings, fleeting, of how through the drudgery and heartbreak of life, both of you are still able to find each other's simple beauty of presence. Love really is the quietest feeling in the world. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the tenderness of love: A Summery Love Story (in the middle of winter) I Never wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy Capturing the Feeling 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: About Moments by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/235-about-momentsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Old age is often a sadness, not so much for the slowing and breaking down of the body’s machinery, but because how it brings invisibility to the aged. Because if there is one section of people who are ignored, as if they don’t exist, it is often the aging. As the world swirls around them, with all it’s passion, conflict, confusion, interaction, conversation, they are there, in the middle of the whirlpools - they are seen - and then unseen.   Nobody seems to have time for the old.   There they sit, quietly, often in a corner, observing the drama, silent with their opinion (maybe they were once told roughly not to interfere?), thinking of how they had faced similar situations, knowing how things would turn out - but, alas,  never turned to, never asked for.   By being ignored, they are rendered static in the daily flow of life. They are bathed and alert, seated and waiting, looking tentatively into the busyness of their loved ones’ lives, asking softly what was up, what was the rush, if there was any help required - but are brushed off - gently, by a good soul; not so gently, by the one who thinks them to be a waste of time.   And they sit quietly, with their newspapers and memories, hushed tones and shaded looks, both proud and concerned. They see the living dynamos, with their blood in them, making a life of their own, with their own choices and decisions; but often immolating themselves in self-lit fires. And then unasked, they get up from their wheelchairs, and break open the glass door of the fire extinguisher, and save the souls of their offspring, the way they did when they were young.   And suddenly, the invisible become visible. The useless become useful. The extinct become extant.   I remember Almodovar’s Talk To Her, where a male nurse spent years talking to a woman who was in a coma, who probably did not comprehend a single word of what was being spoken, who probably had little chance of recovery, but does so because he loves her. I often wonder what stops us from doing the same with the elderly in our family, when they are not even comatose, and would be absorbing of what we say, observant in what they give. In our hierarchy of choices, we would rather exult in the digital euphoria of social media than have the slow patience to savour the quiet delight of a life fully-lived.   If only we go beyond our professed love for our parents and other ageing loved ones, and actually spent time with them, with words or merely sharing silences, we will come back, awash in light and drenched in gratitude. Attention is the soul and water and sunshine for an ageing soul.   As the sun sets, and we revel in its afterglow, grace fills our soul, and the tenderness of what we give comes back to us and makes us malleable and alive.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the inevitabilities of life: She Held His Hand As He Drifted A Garden of Departures 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: Relaxation [instrumental, sounds of birds] by Edvardas SenFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10002-relaxation-instrumental-sounds-of-birdsLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The irrevocability of death is a given.   Even as I can't ever reconcile to it, I sit in awe at its messy discipline. It tears worlds asunder, leaves pain in its wake, splits, often destroys,  but moves unreconciled and unrelenting. Sometimes it gives a little air, some space - not a dawn of hope, but a sunbeam - as a vestige, but then again moves across the firmament to find its west - and waste.   As we sit beside the hospital bed of a loved one, and pray, even if it’s for one more breath, deep inside we know it is against all natural laws.  But hope is what we live on. I still remember the story of the Mughal king Babur, whose son Humayun was lying nearing death, and he went around his bed three times, praying to the almighty, for the exchange of life for life, to give his son's illness to him in exchange of Babur’s health, and it happened, his son was saved.   It’s a desperate thought for a despairing heart.   Just as death is really a passage through life, for the surviving - the bereaved, the ones left behind -  death of a loved one is a transition, from a sensory world of togetherness to an estranged world of isolation. With a numb realisation we realise how much we are made, of what we get from those closest to us.  Their demise then is like the opening of a yawning gap, something which often never fills again. It’s the absence of a voice, a touch, a quiet glance, a secret smile. It is the thinking together, it is the sharing of silences, of a bowl of soup, of seeing a sunbeam together. Of shivering in the cold, of finding warmth, of drinking coffee, of arguing, of hugging, of saying goodbye on the doorstep knowing, come evening and you would meet again.   And then all of a sudden, we realise how the absence of one life diminishes our whole world. Our accomplishments are not enough without the ardent cheerleader, our presence is not significant without that someone’s acknowledgment, a life we might be living in multiples is forever laid to rest as a lonely singularity.   A loved one's mortal body dies once, and we, the survivors, die multiple times inside.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on death's call: When Breath Becomes Air Departures What Do I Leave Behind Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The music is a mantra for the peace of a departed soul, performed by Sahil Jagtiani, from the album "Om Namo Narayanaya Chanting".

"I look back to see if I had left behind trails of my voice, as if that mattered more than if they had reached."   I stay in Calcutta, and wherever I walk I know I do so on hallowed ground, unseen but still fallow with the blood of revolutionaries. It’s another matter that whilst some of it was a fight for freedom, some of it was misguided, for things which revolutionaries themselves lost sight of. The fight was for a cause - but often for the fight itself. But, foolish or brave, nobody could doubt the valour or the intensity.   At the beginning of this year, I looked back with some despair at my fraught world, and I looked forward with some trepidation. And what emerged in me was a memoir of times I had trudged through, as also a strange memorial for things still to come.   But I had promised myself something a long time back - on that quibble called hope. Friends told me that hope was a fool’s lifeboat, riddled with holes, forgone to disaster. But I had always held that it still floated, and to mix metaphors,  it was still sweeter than the acid of cynicism, which corroded even as it breathed.   But what the despair made me do was to doubt my voice, question it’s potency, ask about its reachability. What it made me do is to question if everybody’s pain needed to be seen with the same heart, if one wound needed to be tended and another ignored.   What would this world do to my soul?   And that’s where I want myself and this world to again seek innocence. To trust, to have faith, to laugh, to love - and maybe get destroyed in the process, but at least live what is left of life in the high castle of hope.   It’s a beguiling wish from a fool. But there are too many stories of fools who have been destroyed but whose mere idea has made us live with love, dignity and passion.   A life lived with this is no mean success, however curtailed it might be.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on identity and hope: Yes And I Know These of You Difficult Child 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: Stormpath by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9816-stormpathLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Life is a pean of reaffirmations. In its hurly-burly urgencies we often forget that what anchors us is often the humdrum boring comfort of relationships which let us be what we are. We can say anything knowing our love won’t be questioned, we can take people for granted without our intentions being put into a dock, we can let silences surround us knowing them to be as potent as a conversation.   But to get to that state is to first embark on a journey. Relationships take time. They have to be transversed through the hills and valleys, yes, but also through the pots and pans, of life. There are glorious sunsets to get lost in but also the harshness of singular floodlights. There are triumphs of togetherness to hold on to, as also the bouts of lonely lookouts. There are the warm summer evenings to linger in but also the biting cold of an aching heart. There is time seamlessly bequeathed but also the tiptoeing when none is given.   The irony of relationships is that if you survive the scrounging of lees in an unending chasm, you will enjoy the riches of the rocks of togetherness. Because what sustains a couple is a mysterious alchemy of the understandable and felt, shown and realised, the brusque and the smooth. With the ones closest to us, too much is often made of too little. The challenge is always then to not mistake  the ephemeral for a fact, just as we often mistake the windblown emotion as a determinant of intention.   Though the longevity of a relationship is scarcely an indicator of it’s quality, the long trudge HAS to be undertaken to understand every strand of a person’s being. It takes time to understand that couples are conjoined not only because of what they are but because of what they have survived, which, in the schemata of engagement, often means surviving each other.  Victims of love always bleed. But the survivors are the ones who hold their hands and find the sun burnishing their skin into gold.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on yearning: The One Who Left (Herself Behind) The Passing of Autumn And She Waited For My Call 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: Satisfaction by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/339-satisfactionLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A new year is just an artificial break for us to catch our breath, simmer down and look back to see the terrain we have travelled. There’s nothing good or bad - there are only things to either celebrate or to learn from. The wisest of us has done the stupidest of things - and are often better and happier for it. In thought, word or action we have all transgressed - we have sinned, plotted, cursed. The steam of our desires, obsessions, yearnings have found its outlet. We have some ashes left behind, some remembrance, or just that guilty happy feeling, which somehow fills our life’s crevices.   What we can’t do is to live life with cracks, regrets. To look back or forward and only see impossibilities. There are too many slivers of light surrounding our days for us not to find one to hold onto and climb out of this grim world. All we need is faith, the belief that at the end of the shaft, the bottom of the chasm, or where light turns to darkness, there is something which awaits us, something which we will fall in love with, which speaks to us. Where we can let go, and know there is nothing but a flight ahead.   So onwards, my loves, there’s always something left to celebrate and fall in love with! Revel!   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how time adn tides wait for none: Let Life Break Your Heart How I Stumbled in My Search for Eternity I Am A Residue of Life 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-license

"I will learn someday that truth is a flight from penumbra to light, from the man scared to show his scars, to the child I can be to the world;             there’s innocence in truth,             it makes others reveal their wounds."   The biggest truth of lies is also the most uncomfortable - we tell lies to deflect our truths, not only from others but also ourselves . If we are sensitive to ourselves and our worlds, we find a twitch in our conscience. If we are inured and leathered and layered, we ski over the the thinnest ice with complete elan and disregard.   What makes us tell lies?   Of course, when truths are uncomfortable, if we are revealed to be perpetrators, when the charter of accountability is much greater than the act’s payback. More debilitatingly, when we wish harm unto someone, or are not ready to reveal the truth of what we are. Ensconced in the thin layer of a lie is the desire of image or deflection. So much of what we are is predicated on what we say - we naturally believe each other, and to lie is to create an image of others or ourselves which is skewed as per our own warped imagination.   What of the discovery of an untruth?   We are intrinsically innocent to belief, which is also why when our trust in the other’s truth is broken, it is nigh impossible to put it back into a pristine state again. Lives change with one untruth - battles are won or lost, relationships sustain or don’t, courage is found or varnished.   But what does it do to the perpetrator of the lie?   From time immemorial, the hauntings of lies have destroyed men, as they have not been able to see their own ugliness in the mirror. A man with a conscience is a man forever vulnerable to truth's perpetuating call. Because that’s what it really is. Truths are never clarion calls, they are never drumbeats, they lie quietly as facts, without squealing, without prancing. But  - away from the deflection, away from the glare - they grow in size, in stature, as prosaic as fact, as quiet as an ambush. And when they are revealed, they unwittingly explode, besmirching the ones who ignored it, wounding the ones discovering it.    What about people who boldly ignore ramifications of revelations, who start and end from an instinct of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement? When they embrace untruth with aplomb and carry it through with bold disregard to anything and everything. We all know such people - bold, brazen, ballsy. Likeable people too, powerful ones often, but purveyors of stories. Perpetual liars, often carrying it as a pathological disease.  Is there an Armageddon for them, a final retribution, something which brings back the balance to truth?   Much as we might wish for redemption, the fact is that the world celebrates the bold, people who can get away with anything if they are brazen enough. It is the nature of the beast that with aggression, one can hold on to one’s  lies and ward off truth’s gentle assertions. Liars persevere, they even prosper. They find their suns and preen in their shadowless brightness. We can wish karma to find them at some point, but that is in the air and often wishful thinking.   Truths and lies are personal choices. Their ramifications can torpedo targets or self-inhilate the purveyor. If people can risk relationships for a simple lie, then possibly there is a backstory and they were victims first; if they can risk reputations, they are probably blasé in thinking that nothing can destroy them. Either way, a liar is risking a lot with no line of sight of the harm he creates. Wittingly or unwittingly.   What the worth of a lie is often sought  to be found in the value of its intent or its history. Like everything else, it is but a reflection of every person's owned and personal integrity.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beauty and heartbreak of life: Lovers of Broken Mountains Chemo: As I Battle Myself How She Knew (that he was unfaithful) Follow me on Inst

Each one of us is such a complex mess. Even the most sorted of us passes through noisy bazaars of wavering decisions, competing choices and moral dilemmas. And we invariably are victims of our own pitiable choices. The right and wrong of things is often simpler to decipher than what is right or wrong in the moment. Our ethical dilemma is often a post-act regret or engendered by the heat of revelation. We slip, we regret, we get punished. Then we either move on - or rot in the prison of our conscience.   But it’s a tragedy of our times that we are often characterised as the sum of just one mistake, just one proclivity, just one flaw. There’s a judgement passed.  And our place in the sun is snatched and we are relegated to the darkest recesses of the universe. Every good we have ever done is subsumed in the tsunami of one deviance, one error.   As we sit at the wrong end of a poorly-defined and often hypocritical judgement criteria, we find ourselves judging ourselves and sinking into a cesspool of self-incrimination. Life presents itself in its darkest hues.   We are often our worst not because we are but because the world expects it of us. What is the road to redemption for us who’ve given up on ourselves? Standing in the glare of judgement, we often forget that on the margins of life are waiting it’s grace and kindness. It could be in the form of a person, a poem, an incident, a purpose or a remembrance. That’s life’s hidden sunbeam. The one which is our ladder to reclaim ourselves.   Finally, we have to give meaning to our own lives. Those who stand in judgement are only reflecting their own shadows, and we have to emerge out of those. When we step out of the minefields of our mistakes and the world's opinions, we find endless fields of flowers and sunlight. We would finally be home.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beauty and heartbreak of life: How I Stumbled in My Search for Eternity An Onanist's Guide to Loneliness The Tragedy of Seeing Life As A Broken Enterprise 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: You Can't Stay Here by Michal MojzykiewiczFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10070-you-cant-stay-hereLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://soundcloud.com/michaldrums

"We made love in our own way, not calamitous, not celebratory in the end, she didn’t relent, I didn’t fail, my love redeemed at the altar of sex.   I held her close, more comfort than desire, we both knew we’d now reached a phase - for love is a feral cry in some throats, and in some it survives with a gentle ache."   I think too much has been said of the sublimity of lovemaking and too title of it’s difficulties. The mechanics are intuitive, not the art. There are subtleties which makes the endeavour one of discovery. You can very well put your foot on the pedal and race the car away, but to drive whilst appreciating the passing scenery, to manage the bumps on the road, and to reach the destination drenched in beauty is an experience which goes beyond elemental understanding.   And what about the time when the body ages and desire doesn’t? Or when you age and your partner doesn’t? Lovemaking then is both a rare whiskey and a marathon. When you get there, it’s a relief first and then a celebration; if you don’t, it’s a recognition that time and tide always have their sad messages.   But more than anything else it is an insight into the kindness and affection of partners in love - how do they face changes of diminishing desire or sheer inability. The broader lesson is how relationships need to be open to change and find ways of resolution rather they letting issues  overwhelm them.   The tenacity of a relationship will be tested, time and again, in all kinds of ways - and one of the most moving testaments to it is of acceptance. When we love the soul of a man, small things are quirks, big things are quiddities, and everything is an opportunity to again find grace in the enjoined life.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on finding grace in lovemaking: Such are Such Days (or the days I make love to her) Finding Souls Between Their Legs Map My Body, Lover 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: Hopeful by Phat SoundsFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10130-hopefulLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PhatSounds74 Music: You Did This by Phat SoundsFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10132-you-did-thisLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PhatSounds74

"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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

"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

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/

What are we if not morsels in this universe searching for meaning? If we are alive to the moment we float through life; if we battle with time to get its predominance, we find passages with hurdles; and if we search and mull and have conversations with life to figure out it’s import, we find false endings.   What are we to do if not wrestle with ourselves, to give credence to our struggles?   We face life with our hands curled into fists, battle-ready, already battle-weary. We think it is a race to hit the tape, a game of dominance, to be something called the best. We get entangled in trappings and on a daily basis we diminish ourselves in a desperate bid to be a beast.   We forget, time and again, that we merely need to be the best of ourselves , to know the best of life. To know generosity, to know giving as the only way to get, to face vicissitudes with the excitement of a scholar discovering new principles.   But, over and above everything, to know that in seeking meaning, we give meaning. And nothing, nothing, goes waste. Everything we give of ourselves into the universe has a legacy, the fruits of which we might or might not see in our lifetimes. It could be tangible as art or the written word, or it could be amorphous as a thought, which still gets transmitted to the world in mysterious ways.   We are magicians. We should never forget that. But are we the ones who bring awe and wonder into the world or are we evil, using our talent and clout for personal gain which the universe deems as unwieldy and unsustainable. The messaging is clear and unambiguous, it’s we who are arrogant enough to ignore its signs. Untimely sickness, pain, loss. They all find their way into the vacuum which evil leaves. Generosity fills, and there is no space left for anything at all, because happiness is expansive enough to fill the universe.   The thunder which reverberates in our skies could bring rain which nourishes our soul further - or it could bring storms which destroy  everything which we built because we’d already destroyed the foundation on which we built our home on.   Eternity then is nothing more than the innocence  of our souls and the embracing of the thunder which engulfs our life perforce.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on questions relating to the meaning of life - Rediscovering Heaven Yes... Seasons as Consultants to Life 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: Relaxation 4 by Frank SchroeterFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9834-relaxation-4License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frank.schroeter.52

The passing of a speeding train. It’s whistle from afar. The smoke from the now-disappearing steam engines. The rapidly decreasing chug-chug as it leaves a railway station.   These sounds and images are sepia-tinted in my memory, fraying at the ends with passing time. But making me remember - what a time that was. And I drown so heavily in the past, that I wallow and I wonder - is nostalgia a benediction or a curse? Writers extol me - don’t drown in that lake, or your words would forever be cursed by mush and sentimentality. My heart says - linger, a little longer, before climbing the mountain of today.   When has a poet ever listened to his head? I fallow.   I sometimes think the wonder which filled our Iives in our childhood had more stars than the skies - the innocence of growing up allowed anything and everything to fill its illimitable space. And as time passed by, the skies drowned in the depth of minutiae’s ocean. Till memories surfaced like flotsam when an ancient breeze came by to ripple the water’s surface. And we asked  ourselves “whither?”   Life’s trajectories always seem to take us away. Away from what we love, away from what we cared, away from things which made us the persons we were, away from what we now call ‘our roots’. But by then we are far gone, foregone. We are the rubber band which has been pulled beyond shape. And we look back, stretched and irredeemable, with yearning and regret.   I now know what the writers meant - and what they missed.   Nostalgia is a country for the tired soul. Its revisitation is not a weakness, because it is primarily a resting place. It is to do with standing at one’s own window, letting either the winter sun in or the falling dusk, and remember what it all meant, at a time when we were not in search of meaning at all. And how those times mean the world to us now.    If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems steeped in nostalgia - Those Days of a Lost Summer Lost Atlas of Belonging One 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 Train in the Darkness by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7240-the-train-in-the-darknessLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles Music: Autumn Dusk by chilledmusicFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9843-autumn-duskLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

We lose out on so much of life because we know lesser and lesser of lucidity. We find knots where none exist. We tie ourselves up when there is nobody out to do it. What is it about the wiring of our brains that we revel in complexity and then dream of a simpler life?   It is the nature of the world we live in that pushes us towards choices and then watches in glee as we careen over the cliff. But life is nothing if not of the present and the persistent.   As a species we want to hurry - noodles in two minutes, love at first sight. Impossible deadlines and  divorce in a jiffy. Impatient to reach, desperate to get out. We have forgotten to linger, to let things find their own resolutions. We force issues, we lean into people. We seek marathons and then want to run them as 100 metre dashes. And in love?   In love we want eternities in our honeymoon, and honeymoons for our lives. There’s nothing which can possibly stop us from the enormity of life being taken as condensed editions of time itself. But the dynamics of the evolution of anything are only revealed to the one who’s patient.   Relationships evolve not over days, months or even years, but over lifetimes.   Finding familiarity is a function of patient excavation and not a case of fast dating. We need the night, we need the sunbeam, we have to weather the storms and seek shelter in the rain, we have to cook terrible meals and see sublime sunsets, we have to be terrible lovers and caring compatriots, we have to have a difficult child who we raise together to figure the blessing in our lives. The journey has to find the terror of the Tibetan highlands and the grandeur of the New Zealander passes. It has to take in the best and the worst. To find us naked and clothed, to see us alone and with witnesses. And then, and then only, can we say that we’ve found life in all its myriad shades and have known people as the stones or jewels that they truly are.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on life's lucidities - Flutter In The Drift We Will Find Our Certainties Capturing The Feeling 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: E.C.H.O by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9762-echoLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/

So much of what we do is a matter of awakenings and slumber. Literally and figuratively, we go to sleep in doubt and awaken with certitudes. But ironically the importance lies in the drift. Because that’s when we are true to ourselves, and not berating the universe for its shingle or rust. The magic is in the moment.   To love, to ease into lovemaking and then to sigh into remission, are life’s unasked-for gifts, for us to know that whatever the flutter vicissitudes would bring into our worlds, there is always the concomitant  joy of paradise found. Because there are truths to discover and reconfirm, lies to uncover and not pay attention to, a life to ease oneself into.   We are always afraid of the first time. The anticipation ties knots inside and the expectation of disaster shackles our nerves. It’s a worn-out cliche now to talk about finding excitement beyond the pale of risk. In reality, there’s just one moment which could turn our life over. To be present. To be available. To let ourselves be the handmaiden of the moment. We are changed merely because we let ourselves ease through closed doors, with the believe that the arc lights were always ours.   As author Anne Lamott says so eloquently - “Grace always meets you exactly where you are, but does not leave you where it found you.”   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joys and exasperations of lovemaking - Finding Souls Between their Legs Why Don't You Make Love To Me Anymore Bringing The Storm Home 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: Imagefilm 015 by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/296-imagefilm-015License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de Music: Heart Love by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-loveLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles

A marriage is already beset with contrariness in its very idea. They say, anthropologically, a marriage is against man’s overriding instinct to rampantly spread his seed, to ensure progeny from someone at least. Nature-wise, it goes against the principle of seeking fulfilment, because one person can rarely, if ever, fulfil the myriad parts of a person's needs. I can be gregarious but end up with a self effacing private wife. I’m bursting with the need to reach out, talk, swap tales and have a drunken Saturday night but end up with a husband who only wants to watch sports on tv. I might be spiritual in an unending search, and be with a wife in need of unending conversations.   And that’s when we start aching with the gaps inside. Of feeling life out as a ragtag enterprise with little redemption. One damning relationship is an irredeemable scar sometimes. And solutions are invariably forked.   Friendships made as an individual and not a couple or falling in love with another whilst married, are often two sides to a hard line - one side is sexless, another is not. For embedded in the institution of marriage are trust, hurt and jealousy. And none of these can be easily brushed off. As it often determines what can be embraced and what cannot.   It is easy to find reconciliations and touch points of comfort as one ages, if a couple has survived the vicissitudes and the incessant rambling of youth, because reaching a plateau of acceptability is itself an arduous task. But there is a stillness to be got, and a distillation of instincts which emerges as one grows old. For our needs, which have wild compasses in youth, finally find a North Star as age and time catch up.   After shrugging off the hunger for variety and the search for the verity, there’s a plateau a person reaches, distilled of distraction, a clear distillate of failed attempts, derived realisations and evolved priorities. We are finally reconciled. And know what’s important. Maybe it’s after having all experiences, that we are able to denounce some, maybe it’s after burning our relationships to near charred state that we realise what is most important.   But irrespective of the genesis being hypocrisy or awakement, there is a peace which emerges. Of knowing that what ensues is distraction-less, of knowing that like so much else, life is also an emblem of perception, perjury, preparation and peace. We complicate things needlessly when we have the strength to realise and redeem, we search for the new when our curiosity burns like the Northern Lights, we are ready to commit to the foolish when we have the time to live out its fallouts. But it all passes.   Marriage, which we enter sometimes duty-bound, sometimes as a mistaken culmination to love, is itself a complexity. But if we emerge from its initial skirmishes and subsequent battlefields, without fallen bodies and fatal injuries, we will find beauty embedded in its gashes and scars. Like so much else, two people together are a lesson in finding zen in unwashed dishes whilst standing on the corpses of past selves, smiling into the joint journey of survival.    If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joy and challenges of marriage - Love's Night of the Long Knives Extraordinary Life 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: Epic Intro 2017 by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/558-epic-intro-2017License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de  Music: Die Unendliche Geschichte by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/512-die-unendliche-geschichteLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-end

These past few days, I’m thinking a lot about the reality of a nation, and time and again I’m coming back to the idea of a nation. I talk to people who love this country - possibly can die for it - but when questioned about the state of the nation, are either heartbroken, broken, or ready to break something.   There’s an atlas of indignation inside them and they follow its contours whenever the country is discussed. The atlas has only troughs and heights. But the tops are reached with difficulty and rarely, and they languish in the valley of their anger and despair. They conceive of the entirety of a nation’s complexity in a few algorithms of politics and society. Their mood is driven by the headlines, and the headlines are driven by the nature of the publication they read, and the publications are driven by what is most sensational on the day.   Regardless, our hearts are broken every morning.   Even as we breathe it’s air, and hum it’s tunes, even as we transverse the streets which we love as our own back door, and spend an evening with those who give meaning to our existence, we focus on our idea of what we think is happening to the country and hate half its politicians , and more debilitatingly, half its people.   Who are we judge? Who are we to judge people? Anyone as deeply flawed as we are, anyone with the prejudices we carry inside of us, is in no position to cast aside the belief systems of the other half. For in doing so, we are compromising the diversity of thoughts and beliefs of a mass of our brethren, we are rejecting them not for their humanity or generosity but because of what they believe in politically.   There are some wrongs, which are in the realm of black and white. But others are our ideas of situations and people. Nothing more nothing less. All we need is a quietude and a question, to reach out, to reach in. And then to walk side by side, comfortable in the knowledge that we both believe what we do, and are still terrific people to know.   The day we find our bridges over our most deep-seated resentments, we are on the way towards finding our nation’s true DNA and not get lost in our idea of what it is.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the triumph & tragedies of a nation: Blood & Light in the War Zone Sounds of Living & The Dead Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh 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: Gracias by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/260-graciasLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de Music: Farm [full version] by Alexander NakaradaFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8206-farm-full-versionLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/

Mornings are strange places. They are an urging, a calling, a welcoming. But often they are a desperation, a question, a challenge. We define it, the way we lean into it. But by its mere presence, it provides space to our lives.   If we seek to be presences, knowing how to let the universe pass through us such that we can be witnesses to our own lives and to the world, we can let the morning be a blessing. But if we seek to fight battles with its incessant periodicity, cursing it for its quotidian challenge and insistences, then we move into a war zone, battling  the spear of our despairing hope with our armour of resistance.   In a mentality which sees change as a needless challenge, each day is a burden to be carried through. We often wake up with either the hauntings of the night or with the dread of having an endless day.          But. If you flip a switch inside and see the abundance being laid out for us, daily, day in day out, our lives suddenly fill up with an aching extravaganza. The question then is - how NOT to waste this blessing.   What we really need to do is to lean into the morning with a mind clear of of everything. We just need to listen to the morning sounds, just see it’s colours, run our fingers through its textures. We just need to let the universe frame our questions and give us the answers.   When we let the world carry our burden for us, then mornings are a prayer and the day a benediction.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the magic of mornings Lovers in the Morning Sipping Tea in a Rumi Morning Mother's Rambling Lessons on Life Imparted in Morning Walks 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: Cruising (Romeos Erbe) by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3140-cruising-romeos-erbeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de Music: Season One Intro by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/254-season-one-introLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de

The what-ifs of life are a perennial enigma, a source of continual fascination.   What touches us does change us, what passes by always leaves it’s fragrance. The possibility of the butterfly effect - where everything changes at the flutter of a butterfly’s wings - and the intrigue of the sliding doors - what if the metro you were running for slides shut just when you got to it. Would your life be different if you’d reached a destination earlier? What if the delay caused made you to meet someone you connected at an immediate subliminal level?   Everything is speculation - but everything ELSE looks so much more promising and enticing.   Our choices, governed ostensibly by our thinking, are often themselves progeny of chance. I remember Tom Tykwer’s immensely philosophical and fascinating Run Lola Run, where Lola’s minutest action changed her fortune and those of everyone her life touched.   So is there a lesson in all of this for us? For love? For life? Possibly there is. Does it seem to say that life is not in the passive acceptance of what destiny throws at us, as if it’s an inevitability, but in an intense striving which then results in inevitabilities. For then it is time to be at peace  with what one gets.   But much more than anything in our lives, the thing which is most difficult to accept is to know when to stop spinning and to stop and gaze at the beauty of bustling flowers. And to fall in love with what one inevitably  has.   The adequacy of love is a perpetual quibble. There is nothing which satiates. Everything is an imbalance, everything is a quest. We mourn the absences in the person deigned for us. We hate the design of our fortune which keeps us out of introductions and  charmed circles. Within that disfigured womb of our expectations, we have to work out the contours of beauty if we have to maintain our sanity and find the stunning fulfilment which minutiae could confer, if only we had the eyes to see it.    We would then be new people, happy to say - let everything be, let it be.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on love's rocky terrain - Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave) He Made Lasagna Before He Left The Final Goodbye (Or Why Lovers Decide To Die Together) Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Imagefilm 015 by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/296-imagefilm-015License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de Mellow Sweet Traditional Piano by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8885-mellow-sweet-traditional-pianoLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles  Sad Cinematic Background by MusicLFilesFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9230-sad-cinematic-backgroundLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles

"I muse often of his being and his departure, missing the softness of his glance. He’d looked at me with happiness, as if my presence itself was good news."   So much about life is to know about death. In its very concept lies life’s only immutable truth.   As our days drift into countable numbers, we can either lean into the reality and wait, or fight the Dylanian battle of “not going gentle into the dark night”. But ever so often, there is no option. We become fortune’s arbitrary choice. We can only hope for painless exits. But regardless of what happens to us, death leaves behind a form of spiritual debris - the ones who loved both our silence and our chaos.   What is it, to be still alive when someone you love no longer is? What are the stories which now remain silenced? What are the changes we would have wrought in each other’s lives? Because relationships are forever budding, always a passage to something new, always gravitating to the other with new cells, if not new eyes.   So much of what we lose, when someone dies, has to do with things we were not always aware we cared for. The loss is greater for that late realisation.   So it comes back to our present with the ones we love. The only thing we can give - or receive - is companionship, presence.   On Sundays, as I sit at my desk, finishing my editing or writing my newsletter, I see my dad silently stand at the door and look at me. When I catch his glance, he smiles happily, and walks back to his room.   As our needs leave the bastion of greed, our simplest desires are enough for a comfortable easement into serenity. The ticking bomb of our mind finally finds a resting place   There’s something to be said about easing into death with equanimity. Everything falls by the wayside, only space and light remain. And in that peace, even the people we leave behind find their reconciliations. The drift stops. The breath which ceases  finds a new breath to breathe. Life finds fresh renewals. Death finds a new life.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on being alive to death  - What Do I Leave Behind An Epitaph Made of Light & Air I Love You Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Music: Lonesome by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/51-lonesomeLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de Music: Gracias by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/260-graciasLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de

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

We are what we are. But we are also all the people who have arrived, moved on, stayed in our lives. People whose very touch may feel like a hug or an abandonment , a benediction or a scare. People we’ve loved  and fought with, people we’ve been secretive about, those we’ve cried for, those who’ve cried because of us. Just as relationships change, we are changeable too.   We are what we are. But we are also the slipstream of our old loves, the undercurrent of those who hurt us, the flotsam of those we wronged. We are also the pressed flowers of compliments, kept long after the fragrance has gone; we are the lees of the good times which make us remember springs and mists; we are the dregs of the nights of short tempers and long knives.   There is so much that is extraordinary in mundane lives, that one wonders what is evanescent and what stays. Would the quiet moment in a sun drop count? Would a poem which made me cry stay? Would the fleeting memory of a summer love still overwhelm after years?   How does memory work? Is it a crucible or a sieve? Does it hold what it does to keep it shimmering and intact for an insignificant day? Or does it let everything percolate down into a cesspool of oblivion, just keeping back those morsels which then find place in our souls.   Every one of us then is an amalgam of the dullness and magic of every person we meet, every feeling we feel, every hurt we give, every bruise we carry. We are never merely the wind and the woods, the street and the home - we are also the stars, the black holes, the pulsars  - we are the whole universe.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on resolving relationships  - I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy Capturing The Feeling  Stories Which Survive Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Music: Rising Sun by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/86-rising-sunLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de