Uncut Poetry

"It's a lovely morning, she said, / as she drew out the curtains, / has the whiskey found a way out / or are you still in zombie zone? /   It's been a while since we saw the sun rise, / it's been a while since we lingered. / Get up, my lazy disheveled love, / let's find something in this new world." /   One of the most reassuring aspects of being in love is its ability to bounce back, to always fi...

"She looked at the broken pieces / of the precious teapot, / a legacy from her ancestors, / from ten generations back. /   And she looked at her trembling child, / standing contrite, with her head down, / waiting for an inevitability, / already on the brink of tears." /   This poem starts with the idea of kintsugi which is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold. ...

So much of growing up is already burnt ground.   Parents are didactic and seem more of a necessary evil, the body is unruly and doesn't listen, boys don't know what to do with their large hands, and whether they should keep or cut their soft moustaches, girls are embarrassed by the uncontrollable changes in their body, and then there are boyfriend problems and the fact that someone has an active s...

Some of the most enduring love stories are often the shortest. You meet. You part. There are a million reasons why. But what these relationships leave behind are often impressions  which are burnt into our beings. The awkward habit, the shameless bravado, the ribald sense  of utter corniness - the unflinching freedom she accorded you just by her presence. As times go by, and we accumulate relation...

"Here we are, individuals, / codified with an oath, / learning to be together and to / break free, at the same time, / but, generally, permanently / pissed-off." Love comes in so many different forms. So many shapes and sizes. Symptoms of love are subtle, varied. They are often, in look and feel, just the opposite of what they actually mean. That's why love demands time, space, observance.   It is...

It's startling to think how much of our life hangs on the incredibly thin thread of our breath. When illness strikes us, and there are battles to be fought, every bit of our resources - in our body, spirit, soul - fights and loses, fights and loses again. Often, a treatment like chemotherapy is itself a battle. As our skin gets parched, our hair starts to fall, as we bruise and bleed and vomit, it...

I don't think poetry will save us. And yet, and yet... *   * Quote from Sarah Kay's letter in Airplane Poetry Movement's "A Letter A Poem A Home"   Why poetry? Publishers don't like it, people don't buy it, poets earn virtually nothing out if it. I can't day it better than what the amazing redoubtable poet Arundhathi Subramaniam said about "Why poetry?"   "Because it is the art of the murmured voi...

Showing grace under pressure is love's ultimate testing ground and testament. There is nothing which shows intent, persistence and faith more than looking beyond the skirmish and the heartburn. You don't have to be deep in love or in a relationship before realizing that the real engine which drives it is generosity. Once we recognize that, it doesn't take time to realize that generosity is also wh...

An Epitaph Made of Light & Air   I want to drift out of this world.   Maybe a Cohen playlist in the background, or even better, someone reciting my favourite Mary Olivers. Let there not be pain, I pray, and let there be a sense of reconciliation, of everything being the way it was meant to be, to everything being left the way it was meant to be. Someone would crack a joke that I was always fond of...

I have so often sat down to write poetry, and all that I actually wanted to do was to sit quietly and do nothing. Sipping tea, getting into my routine, crossing a street, looking out of a window, untangling a small problem, pointing out something beautiful to a loved one.....as I sat on the edge of an evening, and watched a bird delirious in its abandonment and random flight, I knew -  even an unw...

Years go by in relationships, and sometimes we feel that this is the nook where we fit in perfectly, and then suddenly we are left bereft of  an anchor to latch onto or a bank to rest our boat against. Why is there never unalloyed comfort even in a relationship of many years? Maybe that is the way the universe ensures we don't take anything for granted. Maybe that is the way we get to know that lo...

"Heaven is above and I know where I am, At the corner of the interstate, I couldn't let you go, I could not let go yet."   I have just collaborated with Alma Roxx in their new single "Interstate (when we were one with the stars)". My poem is embedded into this song.   Alma Roxx is the brainchild of Oregon based producer/songwriter Renny Currin. Often times a genre bending sound, Roxx delivers infe...

People who don't know me are surprised that I don't sleep with a blanket of moonlight and a pillow full of stars. But I have a day-life and it's in an office. And it's a place which has consumed a large part of my life - and, alas, is rarely acknowledged by me in my poetry. Even though it has given me a livelihood and a distinct place in the world. So I decided to make amends.  Today's poem is a l...

One of the abiding tragedies of love is the lack of breathing space between lovers. The freedom they experienced, and which brought them together to begin with, suddenly switches into ownership and expectations which can never ever match with what is ordinarily possible. People, more often than not, don't drift apart, they merely suck the oxygen from around the very person they fell in love with,...

"She knows love, / because love was an answer / sheared of every question / unburdened with doubt, / unremarkable as fact."   As we come to the close of an extraordinary year, and wait for its end, we hope there would finally be a pause to the disruption of lives, families, places, things, routines. But when has the drama of life ever ended?   And as someone I love dearly struggles, I turn again a...

"Once, on Sundays, as I read the papers, I saw a sunbeam make its way to her, and her hair was suddenly aflame like a fuzzy halo, as she lay on the carpet, her face cupped in her palms, lost in the world of wizards - and the sun helplessly putting the spotlight on her, for the universe to gaze at her, and no one else."   In Pema Chadron's  exquisite and heartfull book "When Things Fall Apart" she...

"I sit on the edge of the evening, as I allow you to find your way: the sea is low and I want you to know what it is to tread the skies."   Uncut Poetry is brought to you by Sunil Bhandari.  Sunil Bhandari is a poet based out of India. His book of poetry 'Of Love and Other Abandonments' was an Amazon bestseller. His second book 'Of journeys & Other Ways to Get Lost' is just out. Both are available...

Summer, of all seasons, is the one which brings us human beings into our most elemental  state - frank, often ugly, always true.   We indulge and never regret; we forgive and we mean it.   We know that what happens to us, is what we do onto others. And in that strange steaming symbiosis lies the powerlessness of our appetites - we are what the air makes us -  not good or bad - just stripped of eve...

I am amazed how we pass our lives through the magnificence of seasons, and how we change with them, as if they were our partners on a road to nowhere, somewhere.. .   Summer, winter, autumn, all come and go, as witnesses to our peculiarities, our small concerns, our happinesses which seem as tenous as sundrops , as also our sadnesses which seem to fill the universe...   But we just need to be open...

Hope  is a strange beast. It is sometimes the only false note in our lives, and paradoxically - or because of that - is also the slender thread which keeps us alive to possibilities of life.   Little things take on meaning - little actions, little thoughts - nothing seems untoward or wasted.   Those who are too hopeful, are called foolish, sometimes foolish  optimists. But when something is a life...

There are two facts. One. Life is full of the unexpected. Two. It is long. These two facts are often forgotten when a couple mulls its differences.   One of the abiding tragedies of relationships is when couples don't give each other's differences the space and time they deserve.   But sharp edges find their corners smoothened with time; habits which were irritating become funny in nostalgia; wars...

"Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And when we say "infidelity," what exactly do we mean? Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship?    "But as perpetrators have often...

Coupledom is a nation by itself, with its own laws, thermodynamics and compulsions of chemistry. At every moment of a couple's existence, the dynamics with each other swing and change - and if each of them are sensitive and aware, they give into the necessity to be the one who leads at one point and be the one who follows in the other. And if one of them knows the address of scars and the other kn...

Louise Gluck, the 2020 Nobel Prize winner, wrote a poem called 'The Encounter' -   You came to the side of the bed and sat staring at me. Then you kissed me-I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end...   My poem today follows the end which Louise Gluck talked about.

When we are loved and cared for, we should be ready to fight, being fought for or being fought with.    Often, our definition of what is right and wrong has to be put away, and we have to battle for what's ours and what's right.    And if we are injured, as the one for whom the battle took place, or because we were on the other side, we must then know that some battles which are fought with us are...