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 [email protected] 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 MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9369-true-summer-love Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: End Of Summer by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6633-end-of-summer Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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-evacuation License: 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 [email protected] 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 Kulig Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10273-wide-worlds Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Galloway Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10482-clockwork-lullaby Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5769-tranquil-fields-peaceful Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Sunny Morning by MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7813-sunny-morning Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/86-rising-sun Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Liron Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7722-relaxing-guitar Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4655-lonely-fish Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Sounds Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11661-rookie Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11652-shadows-of-autumn-full-version Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11262-summer-morning-full-version Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Romantic Interlude [Full version] by MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10421-romantic-interlude-full-version Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6092-adventure Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/293-liberty-quest Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: The Way To Kataka by Sascha Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/11-the-way-to-kataka Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3148-abschied-romeos-erbe Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: BRIO 1 by Sascha Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/232-brio-1 Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6394-melodic-interlude-two Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Sound Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6137-anotherdramaticscene Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6-flying-penguins Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Games Of Octopi by Tim Kulig Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9831-games-of-octopi Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6586-village-ambiance Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   Music: Army Of The Dead by Alexander Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10276-army-of-the-dead Licensed 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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightless License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Music: Endless Expanses by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9124-endless-expanses License: 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 [email protected] 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 Sound Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6137-anotherdramaticscene License (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 [email protected] 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 MacLeod Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4196-parting-of-the-ways-part-2 License (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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/56-odyssee License (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 [email protected] 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 Sen Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10002-relaxation-instrumental-sounds-of-birds License (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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/86-rising-sun License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist 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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8554-memories License (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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8784-atlantis License (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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightless License (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 [email protected] 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 MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-love License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Sunset at Glengorm by Kevin MacLeod Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4437-sunset-at-glengorm License (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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9366-medieval-love License (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 [email protected] 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 MusicLFiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/9259-heart-love License: 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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9420-open-sea-piano License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Relaxation 3 by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9629-relaxation-3 License (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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4833-cheezy-piano-medley License (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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10547-emotions-2 License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Violet Sky by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10591-violet-sky License (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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gate License (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 [email protected] 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'B Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10491-if-there-was-a-bit-of-you License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Deep In The Soul by Reegs'B Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10278-deep-in-the-soul License (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 [email protected] 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 Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gate License (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 [email protected] 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 Kulig Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10273-wide-worlds License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Music: Deep In The Soul by Reegs'B Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10278-deep-in-the-soul License (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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5844-untold-stories License (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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/293-liberty-quest License (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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6586-village-ambiance License (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 [email protected] 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 Liron Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7722-relaxing-guitar License (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 sun Slants honey-coloured rays That lessen to the ground As we bike through The corridor of Palm Drive We two Have reached a safety the years Can claim to have created: Unconsummated, therefore Unjaded, unsated. Picnic, movie, ice-cream; Talk; to clear my head Hot buttered rum - coffee for you; And so not to bed And so we have set the question Aside, gently. Were we to become lovers Where would our best friends be? You do not wish, nor I To risk again This savoured light for noon's High 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 [email protected] 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-zone License: 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 [email protected] 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 MacLeod Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4533-toccata-and-fugue-in-d-minor License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license The following music was used for this media project: Music: Passage Of Time by Alexander Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10005-passage-of-time License (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 [email protected] 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 Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/235-about-moments License (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 [email protected] 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 Sen Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10002-relaxation-instrumental-sounds-of-birds License (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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 Nakarada Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9816-stormpath License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license