Uncut Poetry

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 essentia...

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...

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...

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 o...

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...

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 mig...

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...

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 -...

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 wha...

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  ...

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 ou...

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 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...

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 by...

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...

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...

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 contradictio...

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...

Friends, lovers, relatives. People we know intimately. Who do we become when apart? Our bodies replace 330 billion cells every day. Every 15 years or so each one of the cells get fully replaced.   We do not remain the same person physically, then what about the metaphysicality, the psychology, the soul, the belief systems of us?   How much of us is built by the new people we meet? What is chipped...

I was in Emirates business class, on the way to Dubai, en route to a holiday. I was happy with myself, my life. A full meal, two rom-coms, one to go, and the relief of my kids tethered, as they slept after all kinds of indulgences. There was a peaceful sea which awaited me, massages, and sunset walks. This is life, I deserve it. I sighed into my smile.   Then there was static, peculiar to a plane,...

I have always wondered about people who go through tragedy, and then fall into profound grief. Such that their lives change, trajectories bend, and a state of being moribund sets in.   In much of our existences, we are all living half-lives in our own way, pur-blind, half-dissatisfied, fully-disgruntled. The world refuses to work according to our diktats or wishes. And we are being continually reb...

There are so many microscopic things which happen which tend to change our lives - not in cataclysmic ways, but in infinitesimal ways making us the persons we become. A word said in passing, a kindness shown when not expected, a smile out of the blue, a touch when unexpected.   And when a person opens up to you with all her vulnerabilities, bare to her soul, regardless of consequences, regardless...

"My love, of a thousand reaffirmations, we know we will never find ourselves in adequacies. Beyond the blemishes you absorbed,                             the ones I ignored, it was enough for us to have found the places where we fitted."   Who are we if not a pack of confusions and misdirections? Because we are so inadequate in our understanding of what we are, and what is truly important in our...

Sometimes you just know.   As someone once said "I knew you were the one, as soon you walked into the room. There was light coming out of your ass!" Frankly, more often then not, love has less drama associated to its arrival, because it is really a feeling which grows and found incrementally, one conversation at a time, one walk at a time, one infraction at a time. You know there's something happe...

Someone once said "The path of peace goes through power." It's not only the truth, but a reality. Sadly.   In a world largely ruled by men, rules are set as statements of power and domination. Even if someone seeks a hassle-free existence, unencumbered by positions, they are forced to seek bullies as allies, and are blackmailed in the name of security guarantee.   In the sick paradigm of dominatio...