So much of what we are is the amalgam of hurts we carry deep inside. As past life regression reveals, sometimes the hurt runs deep, bringing forward traces of what's left unresolved from the ages before.   However accomplished or complete we might think ourselves to be, we roam the world raw, susceptible to the random snide, reacting to the perceived insult, ultra-sensitive to derision.   And we react.   And commence an unending cycle of soul terrorism - attack, inflame, die. On the agency of words and bruised egos, we are ready to destroy and be destroyed.   We grow cynical, we grow tired. We encounter, and soon become, our worst selves.   We encounter the largesse of the universe, walk daily into its wonders, find its gorgeousness laid out for us in the most generous of ways - and walk away, impressed but untouched.   But come the snide, the insult, derision, and our very soul finds its lees. We scrape the bottom of what we are. We forget words are seasonal mists. They come and pass. It's often only a local pressure point which creates them, and they dissipate as geographies, seasons or clocks change.   The old adage of being still and letting the eddies of life flow over and around us, is soon forgotten. We become the current, the tide, the flood. And destroy beauty - around us, and within.   All we had to do was to let hurt come, do its deed and go. And for us to remain serene. Because things pass, feelings pass. If we remain centered, committed to our core, we remain what we are.   And paradoxically, the world around us, instead of collapsing, finds its best self, grows, and we grow with it.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the hurts and pain we feel ever so often -  Hope is Merely Fear With a Poor Choice of Lipstick Heartbreak On Breaking Up (Without Breaking) Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - You Can't Stay Here by Michael Mojzykiewicz Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/you-can't-stay-here Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

It is sobering to realize how insignificant we are in this universe, how much of a speck. And how much the grandeur of nature - a spectacular lunar eclipse, the sun shining on a quiet sea, a moonlit desert - shows us both the incredible world we live in - as also bring us back to the joy of minutiae, if only we have the eyes and time for it.   And it brings us back to the gorgeous littleness of our lives. How the highest joys are often reserved for the smallest of things. To have someone in our lives, who knows where the hidden mole in our bodies is. Someone who absorbs the worst of what we are and is ready to let us sink in their arms, irrespective. To sit in serene comfort with each other without a single regret in our hearts. Someone for whose well being we pray with the innermost core of our hearts.   Life finds its circle completed in strange mysterious ways. They are no large strokes, there are no Big Bang revelations, it is just the comfort our body and spirit know. A place where we are us and we call it our own.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the journeys we love - or not -  Departures Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Walking Towards the Light by MusicFiles Majestic Autumn by MusicFiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/walking-towards-the-light Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/majestic-autumn Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I am so often in awe.   Of another being’s endurance or grace — perhaps a lover, a river, the sea, or even time itself.   I want to learn how they do it -from borrowing calm, to letting life flow through, to finally resting in stillness and reverence.   To see life as a moving tapestry of happenstances, tragedies or ecstasy; living through them, but not allowing any of these to change the essential core of what they are, why they are.   They seem to allow both beauty and pain to go through them - such that they are touched and changed, but not rendered cynical or bitter or stormy or intractable. To be that indestructible rock which is soft to touch; to be that bleeding evening which heals; to be that person who is stubbornly calm and unchanging amidst every provocation we might throw at him.   I want to be that person who recognizes the essential fragrance of the unseen flower or is hurt but does not drive into a town like a storm.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the grace we encounter in our lives -  Her Grace Without Notice Rediscovering Heaven Sipping Tea in a Rumi Morning  Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

We give up on those we profess to love too soon.   There is something primordial, something gossamer, to do with the body, to do with first inchoate impressions, which attracts us to one another in the first place. Because relationships often begin in shallow waters.   As things start to become serious, the couple traverses depths. It's not easy. And unexpected. Murky, weed-laden, algae-full. The clear eyes and the pellucid surfaces of early days is suddenly overladen with things about each other we don't even recognize. It is difficult to swim through the muck. For it seeps into our pores, into the day-&-night of our lives, into our senses, and suddenly everything which was golden turns murky, overladen with offal. What attracted now repulses.   This is when things start collapsing. We completely forget what brought us to each other in the first place.   In the old days, when coupledom, marriages, were unending, and meant for forever, this was a phase which was meant to be borne, till it passed - and one learnt to live with it. Often, things remained as they were, however deep the relationship went. Toxicity was the norm. Individually we were supposed to grow, as a couple we were supposed to fly. Instead there was claustrophobia and a sense of doom.   But the tragedy often was elsewhere. The tragedy was when we never gave a chance to time and change.   Because as one swam through the muck, something magical often started to emerge. Pellucid waters. Depths which captured light like mussels catch pearls. Where the muck was the rough exterior but grace and beauty were permanent residents - albeit hidden. For the couple, there was a sense of transcendence.   And since it was reached with patience, forbearance, commitment, there was a sense of gratefulness and wonder which filled us.   So, beyond anything and everything, relationships need the patience of space. Time's hard knocks are a phase to build resilience, to understand the other, and more importantly, for us to uncover layers in ourselves we didn't know existed.   Discovery and understanding are both the magnet and the glue which holds a couple together.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the passages of relationships -  Lovers Who Synchronise (and those who don't) Return to You I Said I Love You First Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Satisfaction by Sascha Ende Reaching the sky by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Satisfaction Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Reaching-the-sky Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it, Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands. Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt as big as childhood’s sandpit, even as we tell ourselves that leaving is the best thing to do, we feel bereft. What is it about childhood that we carry it inside us wherever we go, however far we might go? We carry it often as benediction, often as an abomination. If we are lucky, it’s the sunshine of those years which light up our later years, if all our growing is done in shadows, what we have inside is a throbbing hurting night.  What do we make of ourselves because of those years when we were open and ready to receive and vulnerable? What is it that we take forward and what is that that we desperately want to leave behind? What is it that we wish was different, what is that we feel should be changed but now can’t? Is there an unwarranted guilt? Is there an anger, a sense of being cheated, a feeling that someone didn’t do their given duty, of giving something as elemental as caresses of breeze and drops of sun?  Because only too often, we live only in the continent of regret, bereft of the balming buffets of past winds,  and stigmatise our entire lives to the memory of what can never be changed. Only when we quietly let go of what we have accumulated throughout our lives and find possibilities to remake ourselves in some form of a sunshine, can we come out as full individuals, tempered, touched but not scalded.  We would finally find a new home. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the love, longing and loss of childhood   - When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train My Little Zen Warrior Kripa (a blessing from a daughter) Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.   The following music was used for this media project:Music: Heaven's Gate by Frank Schroeter Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gate License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license   

Revisiting a place where one has one's roots is tricky business.   On the one hand, there is enough familiarity - relatives, school chums as unrecognisable adults, hazy lines of playgrounds, peacocks, changing views from rooftops, familiar cracks now deeper - and on the other, one enters the familiar as a complete stranger. The air is lighter, the light is sharper, the language is alien in spite of familiar intonations, and one sits on judgement. And a sense of superiority emerges - as if the place I've settled in is not only different, but also way 'ahead', whatever the meaning of that word is.   But the bigger tragedy is how we look at what was hometown, nay home, is now a place to judge, to compare, to find it falling short.   We move on in life - whether it indicates moving forward is a moot point. What does linger is what we leave behind. Sometimes as a place stuck in a time-wrap, sometimes merely reluctant to find new beats, happy in its anachronisms. Sometimes as people, who are happy to remain what they are, tiny dreams ensconced in comfortable immobility. And that is a choice to be happy in one's own quiddities, within one's particularities.   And who are we to judge, just because we have found different dreams, racier trajectories, more informed choices. If finally what we as human beings seek is serenity and fulfilment, how do we even know whether that is there in the places and people we have left behind?   In our desire to know ourselves better, it is often a good idea to haul ourselves back to our roots, and then just sit back and see ourselves implode, explode, sink or float. If nothing else, we will get to know ourselves better.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ways we find and lose homes -  Finding Home in Broken Places Finally Home A Home as an Open Dream Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Rising Sun by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Rising-Sun Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances.   Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is presumption. Of course we know when we are in love and when we are pretending: when we carry wounds like a fireball hidden inside. So much of love is the warmth of a glance as also the heartbreak of a look avoided.   The shadow of love is often fraught with short-term memory. We remember the last outtake, the last remark, the last deed. The fractured nature of our feelings, invariably, leads us astray into judging love as a finality, defined as that last piece of interaction, forgetting the warmth, the light and the wonder of what it meant for so long.   Of course, we drift, of course we are flooded, of course we are castaways in our own opinions, of course we are prisoners of minutiae, even as the big picture looms large beckoning us into its now-fading glory.   Our obsession with the now and the just-elapsed, makes us error-prone, subsuming us in its shallow currents. We lose the perennial for the ephemeral.   And even as we sit at the shore, we drown in innocuous backdrafts.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the way we romance rains and storms -  Dancing in the Rains Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms & Lovers in Spate Waiting for a Storm Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Artemis by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Artemis Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Pondering as I do on relationships, the beauty and brokenness of them, I continuously marvel, nay wonder, at both their tenacity and tenuousness. And how, at the bottom of them all, they all exist on the basis of a single decision: to be together.   However old, however strong, whatever the optics, the couple is together only because they want to be. Years might slip by, a thousand experiences might be shared treasure, but a single call, a sentence, a simple "I want to leave you", and a bond collapses.   And it doesn't require a calamity, another love, incompatibility or differences, for that decision to be made, enunciated and executed. We, as humans, are victims to so many things - possessiveness, insecurities, jealousies, emptiness. And then history doesn't matter.   And a separation just happens.   The question always is - what right do we have in or to each others lives? What is the value of a paper signed as ritual, or a promise made to love each other forever.   And that's why I'm in awe of people who not only stick together for years, but do it with equanimity and a quiet happiness. I see couples who gel with each other with such felicity that when they are together, when they speak, when they share silences, they do it as one. It's almost as if there's no distance in their souls. That, without meaning, somehow, some place, they simply got split, though they were one body, one spirit, one soul.   Their presence is a generosity, and an answer to my own cynicism about the future of long-term coupledom.   If only we go beyond the surface gnarls, flaws, habits and blemishes, so much is possible. Such serenity is garnered, if only we realize the minimising effect of expectation, and see each other as flawed creatures of infinite possibilities.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ebbs & flows of love -  A City Made of Our Sighs Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye On Breaking Up (Without Breaking) Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - The Day After Tomorrow by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/the-day-after-tomorrow Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

We don't always realize, how much of our lives belongs to others, is determined by others. Their concerns, their insistences, their jealousies, their phobias, their happinesses, their frustrations. Their blank stares, their under-the-breath comments, their lack-of-joy. Their obsessions, their obsessive need to control. Their potential reactions, their prejudices, their silences.   In time, what we do, indeed, what we become, is a factor of what someone else might want us to be. Covering the entirety of our realities is the miasma of overwrought anticipation.   What would she say? What would she think? How would she react? Would she agree?   Decisions then genuflect to a person and not to the situation. And this subsummation is complete when, in time, we forget what we want. In the extreme case, we look to the person for everything we want to say, want to do, and even asking "is this what I want?"   This genuflection is ultra-common with Personality Type A people who naturally assume that the world revolves around them - else it would collapse under its own incompetencies. The cost is severe. Allegiance generated is tenuous. And even if such a person is ultra-intelligent, she will find herself to be her greatest enemy.    Thus unhappiness is not always generated, it is excavated, gathered. As if we go into a meadow to obsessively pluck thorns instead of flowers for a bouquet.   Relationships invariably require a light touch. The bonds, paradoxically, become stronger when they are tied in gossamer. The responsibility to a relationship comes not from insistencies of history or law or sacrifice. It is far subtler. The strongest ties come from discovery, curiosity, space, respect.    Relationships are never simple. And we do not always help in making them simpler for ourselves.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the gossamer nature of relationships -  Quietly Yours Lovers as Witnesses I Fell in Love With You (Again) Beside the Tin of Sardines Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Evacuation by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Evacuation Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

People drift.   Love leaves home. Life becomes a refugee. We become migrants in our own cities. What brought two people together often becomes the reason which tears them apart. Poetry is often a glue, often it it only a record-keeper. Often it is a bystander, checking out its own pulse.   And the two who loved how poetry defined them, find the suburbs of love - where they finally have to settle - to be boring brick-laden homestays.   So much of love - as of life - are the boring intermezzos. When definitions of everything get recreated inside endless vistas of nothingness.   What survives is cacti, or becomes prickly like it. Our best selves dry out. And we become our worst versions.   We are very rarely sensitive enough to know how we have regressed, how we have devolved. We see our sunburnt smiling faces in the mirror, and then go cursing into the arena of life, desperate for distraction, despairing to know where we'd gone wrong.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on relationships which are adrift -  Finding Myself Beyond You Living Inside a Wound Perpetrators & Victims of Love Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sayan 21112020 by Sayan Mukherji  

Relationships often run their course. But we don't. And I'm both heartbroken and frustrated at the phenomenon. As I try to decipher the possibility of a rich life, now existing as an afterlife.   It's not a question of toxicity setting in, but of a river in full spate disappearing into an arid empty bed.   And I ask - why do we hold onto relationships which subtract us as human beings? Because what doesn't lift us, diminishes us; what doesn't inspire us, enslaves us; what doesn't make us see the best of what we are, curdles us.   But.   We hold onto these because we are prisoners of affection, of a history which often consists of laying bare our soul, of being conjoined at the hip in adventures which defined us, of seeing the world through each other's eyes.   And then we see this world of two collapse. There could be too many reasons for any one even deserving a stating. Human nature - both in its proactive compulsions and reactive idiocy -  is the same in its self-destructive propulsion.   We lose our direction because someone is unfaithful; we lose our head because someone has decided to determine our future; we disengage because someone doesn't think our advice deserves attention.   Now, facing the world with dread because of an acidic relationship, makes us smaller versions of ourselves, making us give little of what we are capable of. Because we are affected by what is infinitesimal in infinity's scheme of things.   And we go into a state of statis. In purgatory, araf, bhuvar-lok. Forever in limbo.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems of when love is forever grey -  Finding Myself Beyond You Here We Are in the Years Living Inside a Wound Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - The Children of MH17 by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/the-children-of-mh17 Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

What did my palms come to know what did my skin feel what did my eyes own as I transversed universes as I clasped light    conscious we are captive of time and age held together in ways undefinable on the wings of unsaid hope,    possibilities held as a moment's gift    who are we if not fools   holding love as a talisman a bushel of kisses as proof that when all fails there's a touch which knew    as we other our other worlds as we hold love-bites as we withhold wounds as we travel our bodies knowing there is life    knocking incessantly on the door and there is time    time only for one last kiss one last look       If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on ways of lovemaking -  Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms and Lovers in Spate Her Breasts as Shelter Your Body is a Truth Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - True Summer Love by musiclfiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/true-summer-love Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Someone said something very telling the other day. In a court of law, the criminal knows he's the one, the accuser knows the criminal is the one. So in the scheme of things, it's actually only the judge who is being judged.   I was reminded of this when I realized that our relationships are intrinsically not of the other, but about us  - the person in front of us is a mirror in which we can see ourselves.   A friend, spouse, lover, stranger, colleague - they will always be who they are. We can come to them as wrecking balls or have the sensitivity to see them as messengers who help us know ourselves, just by being who they are.   It's then very simple to realize that our impatience for people to change is merely our message to ourselves to reexamine who we are.   The paradox is that once we change, people around us do too. They need to have the confidence of our intent, that what they see as the realized us is an inside-out phenomenon, and not cosmetic change.   Of course, there are the outlier cases, of the obstinate or the evil, of the irreparably hurt or the irredeemably wounded. Often these are the relationships we need to step away (run away?) from.   When you can't change the world, change worlds.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on forked ways of loving -  Here We Are In The Years Living Inside a Wound I Come With Mud Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Andromeda by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Andromeda Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

So much of our time is spent in yearning.   A slow despair of knowing life is slipping by, and of somehow not being able to wrap our arms around its fullness. Of, time and again, sinking our fingers into something we see as compressible but finding mere nothingness.   Of having touched love, but having lost it before experiencing its infinite lushness or its prickly pleasures. Because through love, we know how we are given this limited-edition life but often just lose the opportunity of making something worthwhile of it.   It's worse when we see the copiousness we have lost being embraced instinctively by those who we've jettisoned in our myriad journies. Even as we live our sad life in a minuscule corner of the universe, with our bag of barrenness.   What is this depth of relationship, which is often close in definition to depth of life?   It could take on so many forms. But each has to do with immersion. What probably lasts in us at the cellular level is being fully with the person we love, when we are with them. In conversations, in silences, in disagreements, whilst grieving, when in joy. As close as possible physically, as much in soul when not. The importance is the intermeshing. Of being so close that we are able to experience each other's breath.   Because relationships show us the way to life. The way to immersion. Because in that lies the way to our sense of immortality. Which might not be what we want - but which  gives us the satisfaction that we've lived life to its very lees.   And in love, as in life, this often means turning back to what we've left, or letting go of what merely shines, or of just sinking deeper into the present because that is all that we have.   This could lead to infinite joy, or depthless grief. But, ultimately, it would be giving our infinite to the only thing we possess - the moment in which we breathe.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on yearning in love -   Here We Are in The Years Return To You Tenderly Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Childhood by Sascha Ende Lonely Bird Instrumental by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Childhood Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/lonely-bird-instrumental Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license      

We are what we make of the minutiae of our daily lives. Because love resides in them. We have a simple choice - we can curse at the commonplace or be masters of the mundane.   The ability to observe and feel and let go, all at the same time, is what determines both the trajectory of our days as also the journeys of our heart.   Because the other choice is of getting overwhelmed with the negativity each relationship perforce brings. Because two people always mean two views, and often with no common plane to resolve them in.   It is at such times that our ability to look at the big picture by changing our focus to small things comes into play, and gives levity and counterbalance to everything which vexes us about the person we desperately want to love.   Love is scarcely ever a statement. It's a feeling which atomizes things into soul-pieces.    A patch of sunlight on skin, her fingers gently touching flowers wilting in the evening, an un-sonorous note from her throat as she strums  an unstrung guitar, her proud serving of an unflattering dish made of quinoa, the irresistible urge to kiss her haphazardly reddened lips, the reassurance of holding soft hands with unpainted nails: the wondering if your name features in the lines in her palms.   And you wonder how someone can be an unhealed wound and a salve at the same time. Love then is simply care, the care to look beyond quiddities, to where sunlight comes from inside the person you love.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the gentle art of loving -  Lovers in the Morning A Sense of Her Tenderness The Girl Who Could Lose Everything for Hope Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Die unendliche geschichte by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Die unendliche geschichte Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

A colleague committed suicide today. 7 am. He woke up early, took a bath, did his pujo, and then hung himself from a fan. His wife discovered him when she didn't see him in the pujo ghar.   I'd met him the day before getting into office, and asked him how he was doing. He was cheerful. I asked him to drop by for a cup of coffee. Another colleague did two meetings with him. Another one said good bye to him at 7 in the evening. Just another ordinary day.   Last year his wife had come to me with their son and talked of how there was something which had snapped inside him. He wanted to resign. There was immense pressure, and he had an unsympathetic and cruel boss, who went unrelentingly after him. It was often ugly. And the pressure was getting to him. And he was doing frightened office-talk even in his sleep.   I and my HR colleague got him aligned with a good psychiatrist. And in a few months, he was as near normal as possible.   Till today.   Do we all have breaking points? However strong we might think we are. That point where our heart breaks and our mind splits. And a strange duality emerges, of moving ordinarily in an ordinary life, but carrying a soul in turmoil.   Didn't he have anybody he could talk to - with full vulnerability, unfettered by judgement? What was that last thought, before he took that decisive step? Didn't he think of the wreckage he would leave behind?   Is suicide then, intrinsically, a sad amalgam of despair and selfishness?   But more than anything, I'm angry at bosses who let go without constraint on hapless subordinates, without the sensitivity of the overwhelming effect their position has on those whose livelihood depends on them.   I only wish I had stopped for that coffee when I'd met him. Maybe he would have opened up. Maybe things would have been different.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on ways of dying -  Assisted Suicide Living Tragedy Forward If I Commit Suicide Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Lonesome by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Lonesome Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I was reading poet Joy Sullivan's book of burnished sepia-tinged poems "Instructions for travelling west", and followed the footsteps of her poems into my childhood. Trying to catch the magic without sinking into syrupy nostalgia. And was amazed at how much I remembered - the games, the bruises, the sweat, the moths, ice-cold drinks - and just that feeling of unencumbered joy.   But much more than that was the closeness of friends - we were thick as thieves - and the refusal to break friendships because one of us was nasty to the other. We knew facts, and just swallowed them and moved on.   I think we learnt accumulation much later. The layers of anger and resentment and helplessness which, as time went by, made us smaller versions of what we possibly could be.   It was an irony of sorts - how we were much bigger when we were smaller.   I think normal childhoods glow because we have memories of goldfish for hurts. Where did we lose it all?   When did we learn to layer our existences with slights and notions of unforgettable pain? When did we think memories are given to us to remember the worst of what life brings to us? We are supposedly the most intelligent creatures on this earth, and we let ourselves be buried under debris rather than stardust.   We are the privileged summer of fireflies, the vaunted recipients of a sheltering sky, we can crush flowers in our palms and know of its perfume, we can slip shoes and walk outside to save ourselves from scars.   Maybe it's time to reclaim the glow, which our lives have lost to the neon we thought showed the way to us.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the luminosity of childhood -  Those Days of a Lost Summer On Growing Up (that haze of sunshine & dust) Letting Go (a childhood song) Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Imagefilm015 by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/imagefilm015 Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I am at that age when I see more deaths than births.   And, for some esoteric reason, such news arrives either as an early morning call - these are shriller, as if recognizing the weight of the tragedy -  or as a message deep in the night - when the night lights up with the neon glow of a phone which refuses to predict the darkness it predates.   And I skip a heartbeat. And the news seeps in. And then it takes a while to reconcile with a world with one loved one less.   Mansi's grandmother lost her husband six years back, and broke her back in a fall thereafter. Then an intractable disease made her lose her vocal chords. Then she lost her son a couple of years back to cancer. That really broke her. She became completely reliant on others. Deep inside she could not decide what was worse - losing her life partner, her son or face a future completely at the behest of others. She pondered killing herself. But she couldn't reach a fan and was just too weak to slide a razor across her arteries.   I met her about once a month. She was small in her bed, but her eyes shone ferociously, even as she gently caressed my cheek.   And when she died a few days back, she left behind a primer on things the bereaved needed to do, and not do, after her death.   She'd written -   "No one will give me a bath or change my clothes after I die. No one will touch the feet of my dead body. That's not me. I have gone. The mourning will not last beyond the time I'm consumed by the flames. Life has to go on and become normal immediately. Everything I own will be donated to the Marwari Widows Society, including my zari sarees and my mangalsutra (please note). Don't make my room a shrine. Remove all traces of me. I would hate to have my photograph put up with a sad garland. Give my room to Sandesh. He needs a bigger one, what with him getting married and all. Remove that rickety cupboard. And that infernal painting by Asha that I've suffered for so many years. Don't put my dead body in an electric crematorium. Burn it on a wooden pyre. Do wait for my ashes. And my last request. In time, take the ashes to the mangroves of Sunderbans. Not the sea, but the rivulets. And scatter them amongst the magnificent roots. I like the idea of vexing the roots a bit before floating into the infinity of the sea.  If possible, can you do this in the monsoon? Then you will remember me as rain, someone who nourished you, teased you, but cherished life, and knew when to fade gracefully, leaving no traces behind, apart from freshly-hewn leaves."   And I know as I know myself, that we might lose the final shred of our faculties, but we will hold onto the last vestiges of our dignity.   Beyond the fug of appearances and compulsions, lies the burning presence of identity - often merely the idea of it - which we hold on to as a hungry dog holds onto a sliver of meat against hungry predators.   And we are all better people when we learn to embrace this reality of everyone we love, and those who love us.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on death and other passing ons -  Sometimes Life Leaves You Alone Assisted Suicide I Heard That You Just Set Off On a Journey Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Lonely bird instrumental by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Lonely bird instrumental Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

So much arrogance!   I see people preen into their power, as if they owned every bit of what they are. Old wealth and position are often the worst. Privilege turns into a right; dissent sparks righteousness; power becomes a press drill; wealth is mistaken for intellect.   People forget they are humans - a bundle of gorgeous contradictions, always at the brink of errors, growing out of contradictions, alive inside abstractions, beyond simplistic judgements.   How can any man or woman walk this earth, be born into its beguiling aesthetics and lesson-worthy stumbles, its company of the wise, its examples of grace, and still arrogate themselves the illusion of knowing-it-all?   Decades into my life, I still sit open-mouthed at stories of unbridled resilience, and unrestrained joy; I still stand corrected - and I still let myself be a sieve through which the world flows and leaves traces of its infinite grace.   All  possibilities of life are on the table if only we let them be. The richness comes not from the dullness of veracities, but the magical world of infinite mistakes. When we swing our focus away from ourselves, we find a world full of possibilities - and we give ourselves the chance of becoming the flawed beautiful person we are capable of being.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how life is nothing by destiny -  Sometimes We Remember So Hard Waiting for My Flight For Chennai at the Calcutta Airport I Have Often Thought About God Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Lockdown by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Lockdown Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license    

So much of our lives, nay, our heart-space, our mind-space, is about flying or falling, of binaries like coming ahead, being there first, being smarter than the other.   We live and die in comparisons.   And as always, when we wallow in shallow waters, we never ever get drenched fully. Without realising that this is the way of the world, that we can be the maximum of ourselves, but never more, and that comparisons are a zero sum game, anathema to coexistence. And actually, if we apply our mind enough, they are the interim stage to combine strengths, compensate weaknesses and come out sturdier, more resilient, a team.   But much more than that, falling is merely the stage before getting up.   And to realize that in life everything adds up. How that happens is a matter of staying the course, and later, much later, looking back and seeing how it all added up to get us where we did.   The universe collects the debris of our heartbreaks, the whisper of our tears, the pollen dust of our regrets, and keeps them in a cachet of remembrance, pushing them back into our lives as accretions, as milestones, for us to know them as growth in time. In the immensity of our lives, we should fall gloriously, fail with panache, and never forget to be kind to others - and to ourselves.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on failings and kindnesses -  A Legacy of Kindness Maybe, a Little Kindness Return to You Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Your Name by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Your Name Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license