Uncut Poetry

  "I am tired of finding you  in places  watermarked with  our senses."   The moment of change is a poem. The tranquil chaos of pain is a poem. The end of love is itself a poem. It's just that a poet can put it all into words.   For a heartbroken lover, the city becomes a map of things found and lost at the same time. The heart becomes an almanac of bruises and scars. Everything precious seems to...

"I inhale the fragrance of lavender from a candle lit at 559, I know you'd call at 6, and I want to feel as if you're here."   By itself, love is a beating heart. Never ceases, never stops. It's just we, who fill it with our own insecurities, our fragility, our loneliness.   We doubt ourselves hence we doubt the other, and view love as a paradigm of insecurity when all it is a temple which awaits...

"There's so much I can give you yet, for I'm a poem you left three-fourths of the way, I promise I still have a syntax in bed, which might surprise the metaphor in you."   What's love if there is no mischief in it? What's love of it doesn't become lazy sometimes and has to be given a jolt!   In the infinite comfort of being the cynosure of one true love, also lies the seeds of it being taken for g...

Excerpt from "It Takes a Long Time to Arrive From Not Very Far Away"*   "Why do we do anything for the people we love, you asked, isn't everything a poem we write for the other, every day, day in day out? Then why is love demanded as diligence, when you can have it as grace?"   Hear the full poem in the latest episode of Uncut Poetry Podcast   We take so much for granted. The air we breathe, the f...

"I am exhausted with mornings with their false pretenses and promises, and wonder what it would take to stop it from decorating itself with silver and gold and light and lies, and merely let us be the honest suicide candidates, who see every bright start to a day and know the hypocrisy ready to unravel as a brilliant bright day."   Every morning we wake up with an array of feelings racing inside u...

Ryan Tomlin, based out of Leeds in UK,  became an author at the age of 17. He loved the experience so much he decided that being a successful and best selling author was his ultimate goal. He sent his book to publishers all over. Alas, the only one who agreed to publish asked for 2500 pounds in payment.   After that he wrote four more books- all of them rejected by publishers. Till, on his 20th bi...

"I was a survivor of religious texts which left morsels at my doorstep as they made their way to their lofty definitions."   Big revolutions often have beginnings in nooks and crannies - a kitchen or a closet, a garage or a heart. To confront the world, a general could be less than five feet high, to have a voice which resonates through the world, one could be a tiny teenager speaking in the softe...

"Love is such an unreasonable yearner - full-hearted but empty-handed: it can give a treasure out of nothing, but can never ask to be gifted one."   We are all, at various times, givers or takers. Giving is easy when we care, though not when we don't. But when conjoined with commitment, we can continue giving, through our anger, disillusionment or grief.   But asking, in the best of times, can be...

Passion as lust is so underrated.   It is bequeathed to youth, dismissed as elemental, in passing, as age progresses it is assumed dead on arrival. It's somehow taken as recreational, it is taken as something which is done - and done with. It is taken as an aberration if it floods you, you are a mendicant if you can control it, a vamp if you let it possess you, an offender if it affects every part...

Welcome to the Salon edition of Uncut Poetry.   In the Salon edition, we will feature interviews of cutting-edge poets, readings of my favorite poetry, reviews of poetry books which I have fallen in love with, and pretty much everything related to poetry. Every month, once a week!   In the inaugural episode, we feature the African-American poet Katerina Canyon.   Katerina Canyon is an Award Winnin...

"You will seek other beds and alien alleys, and make yourself lonelier with every journey, as you dream of me in the false dawn of other arms, not knowing me as someone with a lonely soul."   Every relationship is a journey. Where it starts is in a fuzzy past, but equally amorphous is how it ends. Because endings are never surgical cuts, but a bunch of tassels, each thread a possible way out - or...

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet. Her poetry shimmers with the anguish of a whole battered nation. But it is also full of gratitude, as she notices the smallest of things and urges the reader to find grace in them.   For the last two months, every morning I read a poem by her. A single poem. It will probably take me years to finish all her books. But I don't care. Because this daily...

My mother, like so many other mothers, is a treasure house of tales. But with a twist - she is the hero of all her stories. More than the classical tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana, more than the O Henry's and Guy de Maupassant's I devoured whilst growing up, her tales were the ones which had the deepest influence. How her resilience won over indignities piled on her in a traditional Indian famil...

Even if we don't notice it, our senses never forget the value of the insignificant. Of the sun falling on our feet, of that one teardrop falling on our hand, of that longing which fills our world, of that single remembrance which is enough to destroy everything, before it attempts to build something again.   But ever so often, our senses bring these moments into our beings slowly, gently, sadly, w...

"I fell in love with you                          again in the soft foothills of this evening."   The ebb and flow of feelings is the subcutaneous world of love. We are an amalgam of expectations, ego and confusion - and love for us is as much about the blood which begins to flow rapidly inside our bodies, as it is about the blood which we give to our relationships.   However much we may wax about...

Where do the boundaries of love begin - and end? Who is the arbiter of what's right - and what's wrong? For too long, rules have followed the drumbeats of arbitrary prejudices and preferences, bereft of personal choices.   It's a tragedy that after centuries of literature, art and norm, there is still stigma,  there is still disapproval, there is still the need for secrecy.   As couples gravitate...

"And as I lay on the bed, restless, empty, the moon poured her shimmering beauty, with the largesse of the caring.                         I knew it was fragile,                         I knew it was ephemeral,                         I knew it was ethereal,                         I knew it wasn't mine to claim, but I lay full        fulfilled."   One of the things which people often tend to mini...

"When we knelt in front of Mother Mary, we did not ask for forgiveness - her consent was obvious, and what we did  on the benches was a consensual sacrilege, which she seemed to let the mists hide."   Lovers search for a place - and the occasion presents itself.   In this poem, the fact that the couple make love in an empty cathedral, is a symbol of how love makes lovemaking transcend it's physica...

The words "returning home" carry within them a full universe of meaning and feeling.   And when evening falls, and the skies are in ruins, and, something inside us too - just the act of turning back and returning into a place which asks no questions, and folds us into its depthless warmth, is an act of saving ourselves.   Who are we if not the unmoored boats let loose every day into the wild ocean...

Strangely, I always think of winter as a presence and summer as an interlude.   Summer is always a passage, to go from state to another, from one feeling to another, to make mistakes, suffer for them, and never regret them.   So much of our lives is a litany of inevitabilities, and truthfully and figuratively, summers are when we let our souls seek truths, and however much the anguish, we look bac...

Seeking normalcy in these incredibly abnormal times has become a task by itself. We hear the news with dread. We fear the very air we breathe in, we fear phone calls which come too early or too late. We fear those who come back home from outside.   The yearning for normalcy is a yearning for the small pleasures of life, the ones we took for granted, didn't pay overt attention to, and now miss the...

These are trying times. Tishani Doshi writes "You would have expected the clocks to freeze". In this once-in-a-century tragedy, when grief sits outside our doors, and then comes in without knocking, there's only memory, meditation or living in the moment which can sustain meaning.   We all make mistakes. Alas, some mistakes are more expensive than others and get counted in human lives. Beyond the...

One of the most revelatory things about any relationship, is how we discover a person, and in the process we reveal to ourselves things we didn't know about ourselves. The limitlessness of our generosity, the craziness of our imagination, the things we are capable of doing.   We can be the balming breeze, we can be starlight, we can be the softest evening, we can be the sheltering sky. We marvel a...

"And we sat in front of an / auburn sky / and talked of found-homes / and lost-loves. / We smiled at our follies & foolishness, /  & with a tinge of regret (o yes) wondered / at where life had taken us."/   Is there any ending to any story, ever?   Even if something ends, there is residue floating in the universe - or in the universe inside us. Because every experience, every relationship, every h...

"I touched a pulsing vein on her hand,  & thought of the blood she shared with me: her legacy of pain & meaning, an inevitable gift to me."   Our relationship with our parents is invariably fraught with tension and tenderness. We fight, we stop talking, and then, magnetically, without thinking, we gravitate towards each other as if nothing had happened.   One of the comforts of this love is that w...