Uncut Poetry

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...

"How do you choose a poem to write? she asked. How do you find the pulse of that vein, that something precious which is nowhere?"   Where does a poem come from? Where is its birth place? What is its ancestry?   I have found poetry as a wound finds its scar, or a plucked flower finds an altar. The process is organic like breathing and unstructured as a heart plunging. It often starts as a curiosity...

Hello all you lovers, of poetry, of good things, of love itself. As we start a brand new year, we can only hope to dig out joy out of the debris of despondence and despair. I hope my poetry has been a companion to you, week after week, on all things hopeful, zen-like, heart-breaking but heart-healing too. Every page of my poetry is a survival manual of sorts for me. I hope I have made you come ali...

"Much of the world has dug deep into the quilty warmth of bodies, wishing the winter to  find its way away  and let sleep wrap them in its insidious ways. And the glory of sun lies lost outside, wasted in lighting corner dustbins, and nooks where spiders glisten as anointed lures.   Winter mornings are glorious. If only we get to see them.   Ensconced in our blankets, our bodies held in the warmth...

"We would talk of the day to make the outside world our own, and lay joint claim to our individual memories."   A home is of so many definitions. The place we grow in, the place we get our first intimations of the living world, the place we are desperate to get to at the end of a day - but also the place we are desperate to leave as we grow.   Often a shelter, often a prison, often just a roof, of...

"I'm a multiplier of the breeze and the sunsets which have moved through me, I'm a quiver of hurts I can ruthlessly give. I'm withdrawn without reason, I can be generous without a reason too."   Anyone's identity is rarely singular - it's a bunch of elements, and mostly, a bunch of contradictions. There is never a case of knowing oneself, but only of accepting oneself. But accepting oneself is a p...

"There's always a road waiting for one of the lovers to depart."   The saga of love is a play of light and shadow. There is incident, coincidence, an assemblage of adrenalin, a bellowing of blood, a singling out of songs, a resurgence of senses. Love arranges it's own arrivals, often as a storm, frequently as a story, most often as winter sun. It rearranges parts of our life, it splinters our days...

"I see him standing with the skies, grafted into the clouds, the breeze resting in his hair, a black & white etching to life.   I gently come behind him, put an arm around his shoulders, as his drift leans into me, he looks at me soft, soft."   I have often stood at the window with my dad, as evenings have drifted in. We've not always spoken much, but after all our years, we are just grateful to h...

To receive praise is a need and how to praise is an art.   We tend to be so focused on fulfilling our own desires, that we forget that so many of these fulfillments happen because someone else went on a limb for us. Do we always acknowledge? Or do we just move on, unthinkingly? And the irony is that those who support us silently, who give the wind beneath our wings without being asked, are the one...

"All the goddesses have upped and left, as they are wont to do. They fought a bit, showed a few dead bodies, got us to note the weaponry - the heads they'd severed,  the wild rides they could summon - then dived into inescapable imaginations, depths they could escape only in a year.   Beyond the sweltering of allegories and the heavy lifting of metaphors, in the dismal gloom of departure, will lay...

"I'd think the time for recrimination is long past it's witching hour. Your hand is still a stiff board when I reach out to it, and your body is still your own when I embrace it. You've been an icicle all through summer, but the time for bonfires is in - you have to let your long limbs find their way around me again."   The ebb and flow of love, the turning away and the turning towards its glow, t...

Endings are ruthless. They make you forget every bit of acid existing in relationships in a moment. Regret pours in like the flood of a broken dam. But when the last line has been crossed, when the artery is cut to kill, the path reaches a crevasse - another step is a step into the valley of death.   Deep inside all lovers know when that point has been reached. But hope - that great harbinger of f...

"Somewhere in the air, something whizzed past.  I looked up to see Daar ji's kurta turn into  a gorgeous crimson flower, with a small black pinpoint center."   This poem is about what happens when a young child goes to Jallianwala Bagh with his grandfather on that fateful day in 1919.   The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919. A large but peaceful crowd had gathered at the Jallia...

"Keep looking at me as we die, let your look be in my final sigh, we've been compatriots of beginnings  of which we thought there was no end - maybe, we'll be every love's destiny, a passing on, when there's no real reason why, except tiredness, tiredness, tiredness."   Procreation is atavistic. But what about death wish? Not that point where a soul tethers at the edge of depression, but the one w...

"Peacocks are raucous and find roofs with easy comfort - there is still place in this concrete jungle, even if some hearts go for a walk in search of a soul.   Do we find comfort in the quiet disregard of the unfamiliar?"   Our search for the soul of a city is ever so twisted, as it should be. A city needs to be lived in. On its streets, one needs to be mauled with aromas, with its obsessions, wit...

"Come to my house one afternoon, my bed's unmade for all lovers of mine, we will find ourselves at our wildest & truest  when we reach the third bottle of wine.   You can kiss me roughly, and push me down, and I will tell you once more - though you know thirty per cent of what I am, tonight you can be hundred per cent my man."   I've always wondered what happens when two lonely souls meet. Are the...