Uncut Poetry

"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...

"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 ...

"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,...

"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 afte...

"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,...

"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...

"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, w...

"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,...

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’...

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...

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 ca...

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, o...

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 ba...

"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 geopoli...

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 e...

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 prec...

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 c...

"... 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 stabil...

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...

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, t...

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 e...

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 a...

Whenever I travel to USA, wherever I might be, I try to come back through New York. It is a magnet to my senses. I could stand for hours in its art galleries, but also days on its streets. Sometimes as an onlooker, sometimes as a part of its unending swirl. The city's smoke and movement, it's glittering heights and its grimy innards, its populace with purpose, the hopelessness of its hobos. Its gl...

"...the cold's mood would be agreeable as it opened its vulnerabilities to the warmth, and she would lay in it, like a cat in nirvana, and I would be beside her, looking at her, knowing her presence, her silence, as just persuasions for me to be with her."   We often forget people, we forget their faces. We forget the cut of his jaw, or the slope of her breast. We forget the texture of her hand as...

If there's anything I've learnt in these hurting times, it is how bruises crept into me, unawares, unannounced. Here I am one day, coping up famously, and the next minute I've collapsed within myself, in a paroxysm of uncontrolled depression. Without raising a thought, I'm  hurt grievously. The world just doesn't understand. Nobody can see a hurt - hence I can't be.   Whilst, in the meantime, I am...