"I will learn someday that truth is a flight from penumbra to light, from the man scared to show his scars, to the child I can be to the world;             there’s innocence in truth,             it makes others reveal their wounds."   The biggest truth of lies is also the most uncomfortable - we tell lies to deflect our truths, not only from others but also ourselves . If we are sensitive to ourselves and our worlds, we find a twitch in our conscience. If we are inured and leathered and layered, we ski over the the thinnest ice with complete elan and disregard.   What makes us tell lies?   Of course, when truths are uncomfortable, if we are revealed to be perpetrators, when the charter of accountability is much greater than the act’s payback. More debilitatingly, when we wish harm unto someone, or are not ready to reveal the truth of what we are. Ensconced in the thin layer of a lie is the desire of image or deflection. So much of what we are is predicated on what we say - we naturally believe each other, and to lie is to create an image of others or ourselves which is skewed as per our own warped imagination.   What of the discovery of an untruth?   We are intrinsically innocent to belief, which is also why when our trust in the other’s truth is broken, it is nigh impossible to put it back into a pristine state again. Lives change with one untruth - battles are won or lost, relationships sustain or don’t, courage is found or varnished.   But what does it do to the perpetrator of the lie?   From time immemorial, the hauntings of lies have destroyed men, as they have not been able to see their own ugliness in the mirror. A man with a conscience is a man forever vulnerable to truth's perpetuating call. Because that’s what it really is. Truths are never clarion calls, they are never drumbeats, they lie quietly as facts, without squealing, without prancing. But  - away from the deflection, away from the glare - they grow in size, in stature, as prosaic as fact, as quiet as an ambush. And when they are revealed, they unwittingly explode, besmirching the ones who ignored it, wounding the ones discovering it.    What about people who boldly ignore ramifications of revelations, who start and end from an instinct of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement? When they embrace untruth with aplomb and carry it through with bold disregard to anything and everything. We all know such people - bold, brazen, ballsy. Likeable people too, powerful ones often, but purveyors of stories. Perpetual liars, often carrying it as a pathological disease.  Is there an Armageddon for them, a final retribution, something which brings back the balance to truth?   Much as we might wish for redemption, the fact is that the world celebrates the bold, people who can get away with anything if they are brazen enough. It is the nature of the beast that with aggression, one can hold on to one’s  lies and ward off truth’s gentle assertions. Liars persevere, they even prosper. They find their suns and preen in their shadowless brightness. We can wish karma to find them at some point, but that is in the air and often wishful thinking.   Truths and lies are personal choices. Their ramifications can torpedo targets or self-inhilate the purveyor. If people can risk relationships for a simple lie, then possibly there is a backstory and they were victims first; if they can risk reputations, they are probably blasé in thinking that nothing can destroy them. Either way, a liar is risking a lot with no line of sight of the harm he creates. Wittingly or unwittingly.   What the worth of a lie is often sought  to be found in the value of its intent or its history. Like everything else, it is but a reflection of every person's owned and personal integrity.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beauty and heartbreak of life: Lovers of Broken Mountains Chemo: As I Battle Myself How She Knew (that he was unfaithful) Follow me on 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: Mystical Autumn by MusicLFiles Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9755-mystical-autumn License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Often I see myself hiding inside myself wondering how many biographies of pain will I see as my own."   It’s almost a cliché to say that we are much more the reaction then what we are in the action. It is not ideal, but it is a reality. Our lives are touched at a million sensory points throughout the day. Stories, requests, exhortations, kindnesses, things we say which boomerang, acts we do which come back to us as benediction. We are an amalgam of what we give and what we get - and what we make of all of it for ourselves.    And what drives us ever so often is longing. A longing to connect, a longing to be the chosen one, a longing, very often, to be at the wrong end of the stick, but to have known that we were, in some way, the chosen one. And in that recognition often lies the leitmotif of our lives. How can we transverse this earth without being noticed? Without knowing that we meant for something. Knowing that what we wrote, thought, said, did, did make a difference.    Our lives then are a combination of curiosity, creation and craving. Our connections build on that. There’s nothing extraordinary which our lives then seek. Just that we notice, get noticed - and find out peace in that ordinariness.    Note - The name of the poem is named after a performance piece curated by the exceptional dancer Diya Naidu   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on questions relating to the meaning of longing and attention - On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology An Onanist's Guide to Loneliness Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave) Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [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: Sleepers by Sascha Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3232-sleepers License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de  

"There's no love like the hour, and when noise swirls in the world,  it's the companionship of breath  which saves souls with its being"   We are blessed that seasons - and the seasons of our lives - are marked by the pomp and grace of festivities. We welcome and we let go, we conjoin and we celebrate. And in both the comings and goings, we are left forever changed.   What is it about the passages of rituals that we are never left unmoved? As if it is not just Diwali or Id or Christmas, but an important rite of passage, which even if bereft of its symbolism and allegory, becomes the time to come together, to revel in something essential inside us, which often lasts dormant, but finds an awakening and leaves us rejuvenated.   But even more than that, these marks in the calendar, these pauses, are rewinds to simpler feelings, as we find meaning in the ‘again’. The times when loved ones got together, to swap tales, to intertwine lives, to revisit old joys - and often festering wounds. It is the time to exchange familiarity and at least THINK of forgiveness as an option, to at least remember that seeking unfiltered joy is nothing but the soul aching for a return to innocence.   In the liturgy of our lives, this is the familial moment - private with those who care, festive with those we revel in, revealing with those who are tender with our softest parts, and being a different person to ourselves. More than opening up, we involuntarily crack open.  We are better for just being.   And then the aftermath. The unwinding, the closures - and the closing up. As if the festival was an event and not something which changed Iives. Something which we carried as a memory which mixed with other similar memories of revelry and became generic rather than being tagged as the time when we sprouted flowers from the cesspool of our deepest selves. We could well be the goddess left adrift in uncertain currents or a fir tree abandoned in a mothballed  attic till another season.   Or we could let the passage of the days go right through us. Without making us feel abandoned as detritus but helping us blunt the shards of our hurts with unquestioning presence.   Deep inside, we are ever so often only the hurt child who finds solace in an abandoned church, realising in time, that god also fought battles in the universe, and the church was also his resting place.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hurt and glory of seasons - •Dancing in the Rains •Waiting for a Storm •Those Days of a Lost Summer Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [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: Majestic Autumn by MusicLFiles
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9662-majestic-autumn
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://cemmusicproject.wixsite.com/musiclibraryfiles  

The passage of time and the passage of expectations are inversely related. So much of what we hope for slips through the sly slivers of time. What we dreamt of is folded quietly, and put beneath our heads, for us to sleep on in seamless blankness. All exhortations for destinations result only in unspecified directions, and a future rife with its own life. We are rarely given what we desire. But therein lies the universe’s ironic dilemma.   Embedded in the mystery of choices, lies one for us. Not chosen for us, but meant for us. Within the dynamic of what we are, what we think, what we feel, there’s a mysterious algorithm which puts our destiny into place. The underwhelming present of choices and our disappointments at how things seem to be turning out is only a question of a passage of time. For later, much later, we look back and see how things really fitted in. Life’s vicissitudes and our fortunes conspire to gift us a life which we can make something of.   In our desire to seek parking slots in life, we often forget that first there’s a road to transverse. Someone WILL rashly park where we thought we would back in, but going around the block or parking in a No Parking zone has its frustrations but also its own zen charm or delicious mischief. Once we make the choice, or one is made for us, leave aside parking lots, our need  for cars will disappear by itself. For we would  know  the secret of levitation.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on questions relating to the meaning of love and life - On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology Of Bodies in Bed & Uncertain Joys Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave) Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [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: New Sky by Rafael Krux Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5693-new-sky License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://www.orchestralis.net/  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are what we are. But we are also all the people who have arrived, moved on, stayed in our lives. People whose very touch may feel like a hug or an abandonment , a benediction or a scare. People we’ve loved  and fought with, people we’ve been secretive about, those we’ve cried for, those who’ve cried because of us. Just as relationships change, we are changeable too.   We are what we are. But we are also the slipstream of our old loves, the undercurrent of those who hurt us, the flotsam of those we wronged. We are also the pressed flowers of compliments, kept long after the fragrance has gone; we are the lees of the good times which make us remember springs and mists; we are the dregs of the nights of short tempers and long knives.   There is so much that is extraordinary in mundane lives, that one wonders what is evanescent and what stays. Would the quiet moment in a sun drop count? Would a poem which made me cry stay? Would the fleeting memory of a summer love still overwhelm after years?   How does memory work? Is it a crucible or a sieve? Does it hold what it does to keep it shimmering and intact for an insignificant day? Or does it let everything percolate down into a cesspool of oblivion, just keeping back those morsels which then find place in our souls.   Every one of us then is an amalgam of the dullness and magic of every person we meet, every feeling we feel, every hurt we give, every bruise we carry. We are never merely the wind and the woods, the street and the home - we are also the stars, the black holes, the pulsars  - we are the whole universe.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on resolving relationships  - I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy Capturing The Feeling  Stories Which Survive Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [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 can see the wind pick up it’s pace. The skies have turned moody again. Will it be a blizzard, she piped in her little voice holding tightly to my hand, lest I be blown away."   In life we are both the flow and the stock. The flight and the roots. Logical and unhinged. Reasonable and petulant. Generous and anarchic. We are all this, we are all this together. Often in seriatim, more often overlapping.   When a child quizzes us on the ironies of nature or the dualities of the universe, we realise how much of a paradoxical concoction we are. And not only do we hold these contrasts within us, we also get by with a balancing act. We are a miracle, of dreaming of rootlessness while working hard to be rooted. We sometimes fail ourselves by swinging one way or the other. But if we’ve nurtured ourselves well, we would not let strong winds blow us away, and still get to enjoy their breeziness in our hair.   A tree is an easy analogy.   But how do you explain to a child that if the tree doesn’t let it’s fruit fall or let go of the pollen in its flower, it will not spread out its goodness. That sowing your wild oats, with all its negative connotations, is also the way to expand your world. That being rootedness is a virtue but it should not translate as being stuck in the mud. That a mind has to be open and free, to let the winds from all directions to flow in, and out, and to take one to mysterious places.   Because the roots have to be inside, to be the  gyroscope when the compass goes wild, like the metal spine of a roller coaster which can throw you in all directions but will never let you fly wildly in thin air.   To be steady is an art, but to fly is the only way to grow.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on rains & storms - Bringing The Storm Home 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.     The following music was used for this media project: Music: Flight Pack 1 - 4/6 (Segeln) by Sascha Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/179-flight-pack-1-46-segeln License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de   Music: Childhood by Sascha Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/448-childhood License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://www.sascha-ende.de

"I have woken nights thinking of her and then turned into myself to dream other things. She’s in my mind but like shifting sands."   'Belonging' is a word which fills us up. It gives agency to us, a sense of community. We feel attached to kindred souls.   It could be with people who we connect with because of a commonality of interests or service, in which case we would be driftwood, sailing where our proclivities take us. Or we could belong to a family, which gives our heart a hearth, and our souls a conviction of acceptance. This is where we return even after misbehaviour, where our warts are not necessarily ignored, but are not put up as premier exhibits.   But the belonging to a heart is different than anything else. Because, more than acceptance, there is a sense of fusion. Where the veins and arteries connect inextricably, in ways that, after a while, one cannot make out the beginnings or the ends. Partners, spouses, lovers, friends - they are worlds, but who individually are separate universes of meaning and worth.   They are the ones who go beyond being caregivers - they are crucibles.   Because in that melting-pot, our miscibility is such that though our life’s rhythms might not be determined by them, our inner worlds are. In infinitesimal ways, we change with each other, we change for each other. Until we overlap such that we rejoice and give hurt and take injuries such that when we bleed, we find the blood coming out from the other’s pores.   We bloom together and we disintegrate together. We are both the flower and the dust.   No. We are not permanent. Nothing in this ageless firmament is. But we are the best till we last. When we belong to a heart, we ironically our our best self, even as we subsume our identity and dignity - and are blissful. It is not a euphoric state, but one where our sense of the moment and the truth of evanescence is enhanced by its incomparable and enduring beauty.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on distances - On Breaking Up (Without Breaking) Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye 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.     The following music was used for this media project: 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  

"And then I tell myself - he didn’t ask to be here."   An obedient  son is an oxymoron. Each one of us has rebelled in our own ways in our youth, and have generally not been worse for it (though who’s to say?!). But each story has its  variations. And parents have their own tales to tell. And as one myself, I have my tales - and travails!   A life is a gift in so many ways. And much more when you see the gifts which come unasked for. And the giving to one’s child has a tender inevitability to it, which makes it both a duty as also an unburdening - it’s a relief to be able to pass on what one has garnered in one’s life, for the simple alternative is to take it with oneself to one’s grave.   But the corollary which haunts is - why is this passage of rites so fraught?   But then I realise that I generalise, and there are so many imperceptible ways children learn - direct, osmosis, eavesdropping, whilst rebelling, whilst being rejected, when pushed away, when held close irrespective. Our relationship to our children is a lifelong work-in-progress, till the time (and even whilst) they start to tell us what to do.   Because there are no templates for care.   And then we understand the irony that we learn more as we seek to teach. And in that one realisation lies the light which then shines equally on both of us.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on children - Daughters Who Don't Listen (and other ways to be brave) Kripa (a blessing from a daughter) My Little Zen Warrior 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 - End Of Summer by Frank Schröter Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6633-end-of-summer License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

"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

"Someone brought wild flowers home, and their pungent sweetness was a trauma and I walked naked in the house, till I threw them into a bin with three Hail Mary’s."   Self-gratification is a lonely enterprise packed with people. It is our encounter with fantasies but starts with a conversation with our loneliness.   We are often left alone, or are merely alone. While the world celebrates together, we are left with an aching need to connect.  In reaching out, we reach in; in finding purpose we find pudenda; while banishing wayward thoughts we find the wilderness of brambles.   There are ways to be, and be with, our best selves. As we explore our minds with books, or extrapolate our feelings to film characters, or discover levitation with music. But when we want everything together, bunched together with a promise of iridescent colours, where our agonies sing, where our driest lands grow moist enough for spring, when we know we have visitation rights to heaven - that’s when we choose ourselves over others.   To say it’s pleasure on tap or bliss in passing is to miss the point. The enormity of an intimate relationship with ourselves just cannot ever be undermined. For those short moments of ecstasy make us forget - however briefly - the extremity of the barrenness which invariably is the bane of our lives.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on intimacies - Perils of Breakup Sex (Or Why I Can't Keep My Legs Closed For You) Map My Body, Lover Finding Souls Between Their Legs 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 - Dragonsong by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/9301-dragonsong License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Ouroboros by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/9370-ouroboros License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

"The thorns sting, my palms bleed, the blood stains the acquiescent leaves, the morning breeze passes by, whispers - don’t hold on to anything so tight."   I walk every morning on this walking path in the gated community I stay in. It’s an arboretum of colours and aromas. But much more than that, it is a passage of evanescence and disappearances. That gorgeous gladiola? Won’t be there the day after. The blazing gulmohur - here only for the summer. The yellow chandelier blossom - too fragile to even last a storm. The fragrant jasmine - empty after giving the entirety of its cachet of scent. The yellow-breasted frangipani? Hardy to look, easy to fall.   Everyday I see the shapes - bells and funnels,  flutes and trumpets, cups and hearts, bowls and spheres     - and I see their glory and their fall. I see how they find meaning in their being, an elegance in their stature - and a quietude in their demise. Their existence itself is drama - they don’t need to do anything to draw attention to themselves. They are touched by the eye which seeks pleasure - hidden or visible, they throw the same aroma, and preen quietly within their deep-seated beauty.   For me, every walk has meaning - a revelation, a realization, a reaffirmation. I learn - to pass by rather than hold on, love passionately but know the truth of passages, live every stage and love the demise, there’s beauty in the withering just as there’s tragedy in the beauty.   I come back from every walk alive to life because I have experienced the truth of departures.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the evanescent - Distances (Kaifi Azmi ke liye) Stories Which Survive 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 details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sunset Fields by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7979-sunset-fields License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

"It's a moment before.   The stillness is of a zen monk, the heaviness of a misdemeanor unconfessed, the puddle is a pool with the sky in shame, the renegade vine mumbling Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité."   A storm as as much an anticipation as it is an occurrence. And as in all things which we expect, which we wait for, there is endless trepidation, an asymmetric thudding, an irrational prescience, and an almost-joyous fear. We know it will change things, we know it will break the breakable and bend the bendable - we find hiding places, corners away from the airstream, we want lesser impact, we seek status quo.   And then we open the windows, and ourselves, to the storm.   In the schemata of willful resurrection, there is no sweeter joy than to find oneself in smithereens, to know we will find ourselves broken into pieces and nothing, nothing will put us back together in the same way. And in that broken down situation lies the promise of regeneration. Whilst we force ourselves into survival mode, if we are alive to storms, we will seek its destructive power. We will know that the storm will pass, we will know that we will survive, we know it will leave us cleansed, we know it will leave us changed.   So, I open my window to storms. I open myself up, to find a new me.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on storms, summers and other life-affirmations - Bringing The Storm Home A Summery Love Story (in the middle of winter) 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.   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Landing On The Spanish Lands by MusicLFiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6223-landing-on-the-spanish-lands License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

"Why do we complicate the nature of flowers, even as they sway flawlessly on branches unencumbered as they are with either our memories of storms or visions of a merciless autumn. Maybe, maybe, I'm not ignited enough to burn out visions of life which find fears where I should have found the air to soar."   We see the world through the lens of our brokenness. Every time our mirror cracks and pieces of us lie at our feet, we scream into the elements. Much before we understand the potential of solace in the world's unflappability, we find symbols of intent and hurt. We lie bruised and we see blood in the claws of the skies, our hearts crumble and we find the miscibility of dust as perfidious, the world grows intractable to our desires, and we have problems with the hard ground we walk on. Time and again we weep and see flooded rivers in our rivulets.   What is it about the world that we first see it as an opponent rather than a facilitator? What is it about nature that we ignore it’s nurturing and only sense it’s destruction. As we walk through the fallen flowers of a storm’s  aftermath, we could drown in the incessant floods of grief, or make our peace in the infinite tenderness of a sky which still glistens. And learn that light is inside what might lie ruptured and torn.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on complexities of relationships  - Why Don't You Make Love to Me Anymore? That Gorgeous Evening When You Left He Made Lasagna Before He Left Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [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 - Golden Journey Under The Sky Of Autumn by MusicLFiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6202-golden-journey-under-the-sky-of-autumn License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license  

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

"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    

What do I leave behind?    A folder named 'private poems' full of diatribes against life, a bunch of diaries full of tales of unfinished love, a half-eaten apple thrown carelessly into the bush, a spaniel with warm eyes who will wait for my morning pat.   As I grow older, I often think of the legacy of me. Will I be remembered at all, or not; if yes, for what? Or is that even important, for I won’t be there either way - to see the inevitability of the human drama, and how we are but a traveler  in everyone’s life. We WILL be forgotten, we will be ashes and dust in people’s memory. People we love will find other people to share the tales of their breath and time.   Apart from my breath, nothing else will stop.   So how will the worth of my life ever be garnered, known? And what would it mean to me? What would it mean for the world?   I have lived a life I have filled with listening to the softest of tones, the pause I have revitalized with the feel of skin, the breath I have rediscovered in the euphoria of a note, the careless trails of things I have loved which I leave behind as discoverable secrets.   And my refrain reaches a realization. If it matters to me, it would just be enough.   Because a life well lived requires no legacy or memory or remembrance. It is self sufficient in itself, it is its own cache of fragrance and song. And traces of such a legacy will find its own place under every sun - like pollen which is unseen but remains in the sun to slowly descend into the beings of everyone who passes by.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on yearning  - Who Do You Choose to Become When Alone I Am a Residue of Life It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away 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 - Francescas Story by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/2981-francescas-story License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Flucht (Romeos Erbe) by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3146-flucht-romeos-erbe- License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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

Youth is so wasted on the ones who carry it as a burden. The changes which wreck havoc to the body and heart are later looked back at as the sweetest damnation possible, irreplaceable but never ever lived through fully.   We all know and understand the alchemy of a moment richly lived, but still let it  pass us by ruthlessly, unthinkingly. Why do we consider time as a rich man’s wealth, when it can’t be hoarded or spent endlessly? In its strange and beautiful equalities, we realise it is the only thing bequeathed equitably to all.   But we are fooled by time’s serene passage, lulled to forget its irrevocability. And in that lassitude we end with half-lives. In our puzzling pursuit of things which finally matter little - lucre instead of light, breath in lieu of breathlessness - we take away the most precious gift we could give ourselves.   And when we realize our folly, often it is with nothing left in our banks - not health, not inclination, not circumstances - and what is lost is a glow, and the possibility of finding light - and being it.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the summers of our lives  - A Summery Love Story (in the middle of winter)  Indian Summers 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 Positive Way Of Hope Piano Solo by MusicLFiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7522-the-positive-way-of-hope-piano-solo License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

People may love to give but they hate being asked to give. It’s almost as if there’s  something accusatory about being asked to be generous - as if so far you weren’t, and here comes this person saying, gently but firmly, “why don’t you at least do it now?”   It’s not that people can’t give - they can and they do. But there’s generally a calculation, a quick mental reconciliation of give-&-take, of subjective and objective returns, and a decision which is derivative - if the net result is a dopamine high, go for it. Else prevaricate.   More insidious are the false promises, people who can’t say no on the face, because they are feckless, and can’t face their own truths and enunciate them. These are people who can, who should, but won’t - they fudge, they lie, they want the proposal to die out of sheer tiredness.   But what about the time a person is duty bound to lend a hand? When morally, as a countryman, as a co-citizen, a co-human, as someone who speaks out against injustice, as someone who commiserated, who shed tears, about what can and what should be rectified, what about such a person? What do you do with them, when they refuse to reach out or reach in?   In the schemata of life, one needs to simply go on and ask. Show, talk, make aware, and then again -  show, talk, make aware. Often, change comes in tiptoes, it enters hearts like a whisper, unheralded, suddenly. A continuous litany of no’s suddenly opens a corridor of acceptance - asking you to walk in. Why does it happen? Why does a person change? What makes a person change?   Deep within the complexity of our beings lies the tenderness of our essential goodness. We often ourselves don’t know our mind, or it’s mindfulness. Even as a person seems to be closed to us, there's a quiet awareness, a forever openness. And it requires a happenstance, a feeling, an experience, a sharing, a word, an unsolicited kindness, to suddenly open the person up. The revelation is not of a change of heart but a revelation that the heart always existed. All that this inherent goodness requires  sometimes is a mirror to go behind the façade and show the person that he’s a much better person than he himself knew.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk about generosity -   Her Grace Without Notice Extraordinary Life The 101 of How to Praise (someone you love) Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Betelgeuse by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5780-betelgeuse License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Winter Night by Frank Schröter Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6910-winter-night License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Heartbreak is often an ailment which is never prescribed for, but the one responsible for so much of what drives a person, often off a cliff, often into darknesses. In the stories of our fallen leaves lie traces of heady summers and barren winters. We are what we are, but so much of the blood we spill is because of the shrapnel of a broken heart’s pieces. In the morning of realizations lies the barrenness of what we could have been.   But the deepest cut is when the person we love - who we thought loved us too, no, who we KNEW loved us too - now says she loves ONLY  someone else. Is it a lapse of the flesh,  is it lust masquerading as love,  is it a discovery of a truer love? Is it a drift away from me, or a choice made in spite of me.   How much of what she was then a lie, how much a transformation? Is there the possibility of one heart holding two loves? Is that acceptable? Is it real?   The real challenge is to know it’s she - not me, if it’s perfidy, it’s a lesson for me not to be her, if it’s a change of heart, to learn grace instead and kindness, to learn and know what moving on means. To know that to be hurt might not be right, but could often be inevitable. But the universe always has something true for the truly hurt  - the possibility of survival, of finding grace in the deepest cut. And in that one benediction lies the possibility of finding the best in life, of finding the best in ourselves.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk about love in trouble -   The Door is Unlocked. I am Awake. The Final Goodbye (or Why Lovers Decide to Die Together) The Improbability of Wishes Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sleepers by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3232-sleepers License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

"The dirt-encrusted tanks rumbled in single file, the first driver, fatigued, suddenly braked, as he saw a man kneeling, his hands out to stop the tank, the driver looked down and wept, so did the man."   Chesterton said “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”   What do we gain from war? The answers are all to do with geopolitics, belief, commerce or fear. What do we lose from war? The answers are so many that they are lost in the multitude of count.   In these lands, which were bequeathed to us as borderless and boundless stretches, men first came and claimed ownership. They then built barriers to differentiate and dissuade encroachment. And in one stroke, all kinds of barriers got established. And everybody was ready to defend or expand.   And war was enacted on the foundation of fear, of losing hegemony, of showing a perverse machismo, for power, for commerce. Man was ready to die in the firepit of battle, than be seen as weak for trying to save the earth from its scorching end. Man's massive ego rises and dies on the edge of its limitless foolishness.   As Eisenhower once said  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”   And the stories of heroism and tragedy never end. May it be Syria, Palestine, Iran, or Ukraine.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk about the tragedy of conflict -   Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh Love's Night of The Long Knives Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - The Final Countdown by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/125-the-final-countdown License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license The March of the Hope by MusicLFiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/8055-the-march-of-the-hope License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Imagefilm 040 by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3151-imagefilm-040 License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license  

We are often our own worst enemies. One mistake, one misdemeanor, and we hang ourselves before the world does. We deflate ourselves, we berate ourselves, we compare and invariably find ourselves falling short. Why? How can many of us find nothing right in ourselves whereas there are people in the world who can find nothing wrong in themselves! And in this game of self-obsession, where people are either the best or the worst, we bring into each situation not a recognition of its zen but our own stunted self-perception.   Dynamics of action are then driven not situationally - what the time and happenstance demands - but what the person wants. It’s a difference which makes the dynamics of results uneven and unpredictable. And each one of us more prone to our own vulnerabilities, and the situation to collapse within the black holes of our personalities.   But that’s the truth of us and what we touch. We can only be a sum  of our heights and recesses, the obsessions of our successes and the forceful blackouts of our failures. And we wish to revisit the glory of the same path for every endeavor and invariably encounter the pitfalls of commonality.   Darknesses are then an accumulation of too many bright spots.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk about self-discovery -   Midas Touches Himself Who Do You Choose to Become When Alone I Am a Residue of Life Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Betelgeuse by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5780-betelgeuse License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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: Unconsumated, 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  

Do human beings only want graveyards on the face of this beautiful earth? With just about any reason to justify it. It could be religion, geopolitics, hegemony, hubris, world domination, strategy, business. Even if it entails sacrificing a whole populace, a country, people? Render devastation, and look at the lurid satellite images and say “It’s a small price to pay.” And if it’s a difference in colour of the skin - it’s no price at all. And if it’s someone who takes the name of a god you don't believe in? Huh, why ask? If it’s the west, the reason is commerce and supremacy; if it’s central, it is religion and angst; if it’s east, it’s an ancient philosophy of power; if it’s the far east, it’s simply a place in the sun; If it’s up north, it’s what you do to keep one’s power circle intact.   There are as many reasons to kill as there are people. We, the ultra-ordinary are the simpletons, crying over poetry for the right reason, directing our angst in erroneous directions.   At every point in our lives we are dispensable, our nullification rendering not even a murmur beyond the next spring.    All we can hope to do is to seal our ears and turn to the ones we love the most, and bless ourselves with the air and the light and drifting leaves and shifting seasons and find our joy. Everything can be, and is, vapour. We should walk our hard ground till it lasts.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which are steeped with anguish  - Crimson Flowers in Jallianwala Bagh  The Final Goodbye (or Why Lovers Decide to Die Together)  The Power of No  Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my 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

"... freedom is never wrested away, it is forever a choice which we just gift away."   The tragedy of the modern day work place is its uncanny ability to numb souls. Oh jobs give purpose, direction, sustenance. But the price to be paid is often exacting. It’s a dichotomous entity - both a portal to freedom and an entrapment, a privilege of accomplishment and a secret that erodes, a means to stability and an illusion of permanence, the shimmer of independence and the reality of a cul-de-sac. There is so much which we demand of a job forgetting that it demands equally of us.  There is no free ride in this world and the money, perks, and position which are required to put one’s body and soul together in fact delinks the body from the soul.   What is this dichotomy, this  reality of heights attached with acrophobia? What is this desperate need for power and privilege and the inability to hold on to the spoils? The desperate cry to be held when the heights bring  distance without the insight,  when the hunger to be understood often leads to a life full of hiatuses.    What are we if not beings subsumed in the search for meaning? To earn is often the mistaken first step to fullness, without knowing that it is also the first step away from fulfilment. What is it about the modern work place that it erodes our souls so? That embedded within its necessities is the entire armament of destruction. It is so easy to live wrapped up in the beatific illusion of privilege with all its accruements, when the very marrow  of our souls has been exacted as it’s price.   We often don’t even know what we’ve become. On the wings of accolades, we mistake living for life. Are we fools to be fooled or we know no other way to approach life than what we’ve been trained to do? We are often no more than what our jobs demand and give. The fog inside us grows so thick that we don’t recognize our own charred selves, as we put ourselves on a mantel covered in gold and silver. We are our very own Midas.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of sublimity and improbabilities  - The Improbability of Wishes  When the Goddesses Depart   The Sublime in the Ordinary  Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my 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

You have to hear Kashiana speak about the sensuousness of bitter gourd curry or the Zen of belonging,  to understand the delicate relationship she has with words and how she captures the fragility of beauty. As a counterpoint we have Indran, with his muscular poetry which combines indignation, despair and angst into a poetic tapestry of aching pulchritude.    Both Kashiana and Indran are terrific poets based out of USA, and came together for a lovely chat with Uncut Poetry on their new poetry books. They spoke about the genesis of their poetic journeys, of memory, of displacement, of processes, and why diaspora poets possibly have a more universal view of the countries they settle in.   Kashiana Singh is from India, lives in North Carolina and embodies her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her everyday. She is a management professional by definition but a poet practitioner by personal preference. She proudly serves as Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her poems can be found on Rattle, Poets Reading the News, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus, amongst others. Kashiana says that she carries all her geographical homes within her poetry.   Her first two books were Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words and Crushed Anthills. Woman by the Door is her latest collection of poetry.   Poet Usha Akella says this of her book - "Singh’s poetry universe is one of hidden corners, apertures of light, and the liminality of experience verbing into memory. A poetry replete with metaphors of passageways and openings, personal myth making is alchemized from the pixels of memories to define what it is to be woman in this world."   Get Woman by the Door here - https://linktr.ee/kashianasingh   Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant. Also recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube. He also publishes poetry under the name Beltway Editions(www.beltwayeditions.com) and their first published book is "Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air", which is an anthology of poems by six Muslim women poets who wrote together at M.I.T.   Get Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant here - https://www.broadstonebooks.com   If you liked this interview, consider listening to these wonderful poets speaking about their poetry, life and times - Poetry Busker Ryan Tomlin African American Poet Katerina Canyon   Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Rustic Ballad by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4720-rustic-ballad License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

And then she falls in love with a girl.   She reads about it and she discovers she is ‘queer’, which is odd, because she feels normal, in fact is feeling as normal as is possible. The excitement she feels to be in the company of the girl she is falling in love with is as natural as possible. Everything about her is magical, her laughter, her hair, the intensity of her eyes as she listens to her, the excitement with which she looks at her when she goes near her, her stories and the way her eyes fill up. And her abandon.   What was odd about it?   What is odd about falling in love with all of that? Just because somebody sometime, some law somewhere, decided what is natural and what is not - here she was feeling odd, god forbid, feeling guilty.   As if there was a wrong being committed, as if some law of nature was being broken, as if she was, without doing a thing, but just for feeling a feeling, was bring prosecuted and standing guilty. If love itself was not overwhelming as a feeling, here was a world calling this feeling - queer!! What was she to do with this conflict, this battle of her feelings and what the world felt about it. How she was being judged without even opening her mouth about something so …pure, so special, so transcendental. How could something which seemed to have been ordered in heaven and ordained by the gods themselves be wrong, be bad.   She was all of 15 years old, and here she was - feeling the worst at this best time of her life.   Alas.      If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of love breaking barriers - Lovers of Broken Mountains Call Me By Your Name  I Surrender to That Feeling Again Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Betonwaldromantik by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/374-betonwaldromantik License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The concept of home is such a simple complexity. Is it a presence, a search, a destination, a desire, a lover or a DIY?   Are it's contours predetermined, a work-in-progress, a shallow end of the pool or the deepest part of the ocean?   It it a place to rest before the next bout of restlessness or is it the place to determine destinations?   How does its being get significance - by a mere return every evening or a filling of space or a collection of accoutrements?    Does it come with a character predetermined or is it a mere reflection of what makes the universe inside us?   Do adventures end in a home? Do they get beget here? Do they find their demise, their resurrection, their meaning and their scripting here? Or is it a mere cemetery, where everything is laid to rest, albeit with tenderness?   What is a home? Do we require it only for replenishment and shelter? Or is it something which is a part of what we are , and in turn makes us what we are?   What is home?   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the warmth of a home - A Home as An Open Dream The Door is Unlocked. I am Awake Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - BRIO 1 by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/232-brio-1 License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license  

I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy*  * From a line in the BBC serial "Vigil"     "There are always some bits of light for both of us to take away, but you do want the entire buffet of effulgence."   Time and again relationships slip into presuppositions - and we start taking the ones who are closest to us for granted. We find our own needs overriding our sensitivity to the soul-twitches and mood-swingers of our loved one's aching hearts. So much of what is good in us is drowned in the morass of the quotidian. We deflect, we ignore, we stop noticing, we stop holding, hugging, caring. All that matters is our anguish, our petulance, our paraphernalia.   We are lost in our own contracted world.   And the ones we ignore because of our self-obsession, quietly suffer on the fringes. We fret and we wonder what went wrong. Till the realisation sinks in that though we profess to love somebody, we are only in love with ourselves.   We then realize that much of life’s meaning, and often our own worth, is derived from others. We understand ourselves better, through the wisdom of others, our arrogance is softened when we encounter the simplicity of the truly wise. We are overwhelmed with light when we crack the hard exterior of our self-centeredness.   When we draw people we profess to love towards ourselves, only when our lives are buffeted by freezing  winds, or when we realise that the world's adulation is a fickle being, we stand the danger of being rebuffed in turn. Nothing is static in the universe, not even love. And as we pass from one mirror to another, we finally come to the one which is cracked. And in the tragedy of this realisation lies the irrevocability of love which has now given up.   Churn always brings change, and the power of the anguished ‘no more’ has reverberations  which can shake our universe.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the strains in relationships - On Breaking up (Without Breaking) Love's Night of the Long Knives How to Hold Love as it Breaks Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected] Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Mandela by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/209-mandela License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Atomic by Sascha Ende® Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/119-atomic License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license