Uncut Poetry

Some relationships are doomed. They get off to a bad start, and never hit their stride. Or find their autumn of distrust early, and see no reason to change the season. Often a passing reaction is presumed to be a permanent opinion. Sometimes it’s something shallow, but in the face - hair in the sink, slurping of soup, insensitivity with a joke. The reasons can be myriad. But the rusting which sets...

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! 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 of...

I have often looked at couples who are so different from each other that together they seem to move like oil and water.  And then I blink and look again, and I see a strange alchemy at work - a layering more than a blending, stitched crochet then a cocktail, a sun-entrenched day than smog. And they progressively look like a gorgeously-knitted piece of warm-wear together.   How do people who seem t...

Don’t we complicate our lives too much? With our desire for more, and then for much more, for affirmations, and then reaffirmations. For a continuous acknowledgment that not only do we matter, but - that we matter more than anybody else. It’s not enough to be together; we want words which confirm that our togetherness matters. We want cards, messages, heart-shaped emojis, birthday presents, outing...

Old age is often a sadness, not so much for the slowing and breaking down of the body’s machinery, but because how it brings invisibility to the aged. Because if there is one section of people who are ignored, as if they don’t exist, it is often the aging. As the world swirls around them, with all it’s passion, conflict, confusion, interaction, conversation, they are there, in the middle of the wh...

The irrevocability of death is a given.   Even as I can't ever reconcile to it, I sit in awe at its messy discipline. It tears worlds asunder, leaves pain in its wake, splits, often destroys,  but moves unreconciled and unrelenting. Sometimes it gives a little air, some space - not a dawn of hope, but a sunbeam - as a vestige, but then again moves across the firmament to find its west - and waste....

"I look back to see if I had left behind trails of my voice, as if that mattered more than if they had reached."   I stay in Calcutta, and wherever I walk I know I do so on hallowed ground, unseen but still fallow with the blood of revolutionaries. It’s another matter that whilst some of it was a fight for freedom, some of it was misguided, for things which revolutionaries themselves lost sight of...

Life is a pean of reaffirmations. In its hurly-burly urgencies we often forget that what anchors us is often the humdrum boring comfort of relationships which let us be what we are. We can say anything knowing our love won’t be questioned, we can take people for granted without our intentions being put into a dock, we can let silences surround us knowing them to be as potent as a conversation.   B...

A new year is just an artificial break for us to catch our breath, simmer down and look back to see the terrain we have travelled. There’s nothing good or bad - there are only things to either celebrate or to learn from. The wisest of us has done the stupidest of things - and are often better and happier for it. In thought, word or action we have all transgressed - we have sinned, plotted, cursed....

"I will learn someday that truth is a flight from penumbra to light, from the man scared to show his scars, to the child I can be to the world;             there’s innocence in truth,             it makes others reveal their wounds."   The biggest truth of lies is also the most uncomfortable - we tell lies to deflect our truths, not only from others but also ourselves . If we are sensitive to ours...

Each one of us is such a complex mess. Even the most sorted of us passes through noisy bazaars of wavering decisions, competing choices and moral dilemmas. And we invariably are victims of our own pitiable choices. The right and wrong of things is often simpler to decipher than what is right or wrong in the moment. Our ethical dilemma is often a post-act regret or engendered by the heat of revelat...

"We made love in our own way, not calamitous, not celebratory in the end, she didn’t relent, I didn’t fail, my love redeemed at the altar of sex.   I held her close, more comfort than desire, we both knew we’d now reached a phase - for love is a feral cry in some throats, and in some it survives with a gentle ache."   I think too much has been said of the sublimity of lovemaking and too title of i...

"I have seen the future hold stars in its hands not knowing how plastic were dreams. I didn’t want the sound of my breaking heart resound such that the solar system be proved wrong but I have seen seamless skies filled with light and wonder to be only refractions from the jagged shards of broken hearts."   I have seen the most deprived child dream. Dream to become an astronaut, nothing less. Her f...

Life pauses when heartbreaks occur - and then it doesn’t. It’s the nature of the beast that nothing stops. But momentum is often not a substitute for reparation. Time sutures wounds, but the scar is insubstitutable - and it often glows when we are lonely. And as memories tumble in, we tumble down. What comes as a rush are gestures and flourishes, the quirky and the infinitesimal, and the forgotten...

One of the abiding joys of growing old together is to remember insignificant minutiae - some which hurt like pebbles in a shoe and some which effortlessly made us remember why we were together.   To persevere in the complex dynamic of personal desires and conjoined plans is itself  a triumph. For if there’s one thing which relationships demand - after they’ve concretised the shaky foundations of l...

I can never forget the Sharukh Khan movie, Main Hoon Na , when a celestial orchestra comes in and he automatically starts singing , as soon as he sees the gorgeous Sushmita Sen being her ethereal self in incredible sarees.  And I remember thinking -  this is a superb idea, and what wouldn’t I do to have this facility from god?! But, alas, as the heavens never listened in to my desires, I curate my...

NOTE - There are some recording audio disturbances in the first minute. Do excuse.    What is it about conversations, that the ones most essential, are the ones we avoid the most?   With our anger or distress brimming over, are we afraid to show the power the other has over us to leave us with such vulnerability? Are we just frightened of the uncharted route the conversation might take? Are we afr...

One of the unending and unerring charms of knowing people is to know them as flawed people, whose very kinks make them the weird loveable irritating entities, who infuriate us but equally make us caring custodians of them.   The particularities of their weirdness is not meant for history books. It is often no more than the whimsy of habit, the caprice of reaction, or the peculiarity of a stand the...

Making love can be the tenderest experience of a day. Truth be told, the day should start and end with it - with nothing, nothing else to take away from its tangy exuberance. Those moments should be the day. But - we have to move on. There are things to be done. There are commitments to fulfil, a job to go to, groceries to be bought, a plumber to be contacted.   And suddenly such days get redefine...

"Often I see myself hiding inside myself wondering how many biographies of pain will I see as my own."   It’s almost a cliché to say that we are much more the reaction then what we are in the action. It is not ideal, but it is a reality. Our lives are touched at a million sensory points throughout the day. Stories, requests, exhortations, kindnesses, things we say which boomerang, acts we do which...

"There's no love like the hour, and when noise swirls in the world,  it's the companionship of breath  which saves souls with its being"   We are blessed that seasons - and the seasons of our lives - are marked by the pomp and grace of festivities. We welcome and we let go, we conjoin and we celebrate. And in both the comings and goings, we are left forever changed.   What is it about the passages...

The passage of time and the passage of expectations are inversely related. So much of what we hope for slips through the sly slivers of time. What we dreamt of is folded quietly, and put beneath our heads, for us to sleep on in seamless blankness. All exhortations for destinations result only in unspecified directions, and a future rife with its own life. We are rarely given what we desire. But th...

What are we if not morsels in this universe searching for meaning? If we are alive to the moment we float through life; if we battle with time to get its predominance, we find passages with hurdles; and if we search and mull and have conversations with life to figure out it’s import, we find false endings.   What are we to do if not wrestle with ourselves, to give credence to our struggles?   We f...

The passing of a speeding train. It’s whistle from afar. The smoke from the now-disappearing steam engines. The rapidly decreasing chug-chug as it leaves a railway station.   These sounds and images are sepia-tinted in my memory, fraying at the ends with passing time. But making me remember - what a time that was. And I drown so heavily in the past, that I wallow and I wonder - is nostalgia a bene...

We lose out on so much of life because we know lesser and lesser of lucidity. We find knots where none exist. We tie ourselves up when there is nobody out to do it. What is it about the wiring of our brains that we revel in complexity and then dream of a simpler life?   It is the nature of the world we live in that pushes us towards choices and then watches in glee as we careen over the cliff. But...