Uncut Poetry

So much of what we do is a matter of awakenings and slumber. Literally and figuratively, we go to sleep in doubt and awaken with certitudes. But ironically the importance lies in the drift. Because that’s when we are true to ourselves, and not berating the universe for its shingle or rust. The magic is in the moment.   To love, to ease into lovemaking and then to sigh into remission, are life’s un...

A marriage is already beset with contrariness in its very idea. They say, anthropologically, a marriage is against man’s overriding instinct to rampantly spread his seed, to ensure progeny from someone at least. Nature-wise, it goes against the principle of seeking fulfilment, because one person can rarely, if ever, fulfil the myriad parts of a person's needs. I can be gregarious but end up with a...

These past few days, I’m thinking a lot about the reality of a nation, and time and again I’m coming back to the idea of a nation. I talk to people who love this country - possibly can die for it - but when questioned about the state of the nation, are either heartbroken, broken, or ready to break something.   There’s an atlas of indignation inside them and they follow its contours whenever the co...

Mornings are strange places. They are an urging, a calling, a welcoming. But often they are a desperation, a question, a challenge. We define it, the way we lean into it. But by its mere presence, it provides space to our lives.   If we seek to be presences, knowing how to let the universe pass through us such that we can be witnesses to our own lives and to the world, we can let the morning be a...

The what-ifs of life are a perennial enigma, a source of continual fascination.   What touches us does change us, what passes by always leaves it’s fragrance. The possibility of the butterfly effect - where everything changes at the flutter of a butterfly’s wings - and the intrigue of the sliding doors - what if the metro you were running for slides shut just when you got to it. Would your life be...

"I muse often of his being and his departure, missing the softness of his glance. He’d looked at me with happiness, as if my presence itself was good news."   So much about life is to know about death. In its very concept lies life’s only immutable truth.   As our days drift into countable numbers, we can either lean into the reality and wait, or fight the Dylanian battle of “not going gentle into...

I like people who do their own thing. The youngest of the young, the maddest of the mad,  the dreamer in the group who gets ribbed, the one with the wildest theories, the one who always has the last laugh.   I love the ultra sensitive. The one whose heart breaks when she inadvertently steps on a tiny monsoon snail, the one who gets lost on the way to familiar destinations, the one who picks only f...

We are what we are. But we are also all the people who have arrived, moved on, stayed in our lives. People whose very touch may feel like a hug or an abandonment , a benediction or a scare. People we’ve loved  and fought with, people we’ve been secretive about, those we’ve cried for, those who’ve cried because of us. Just as relationships change, we are changeable too.   We are what we are. But we...

"I can see the wind pick up it’s pace. The skies have turned moody again. Will it be a blizzard, she piped in her little voice holding tightly to my hand, lest I be blown away."   In life we are both the flow and the stock. The flight and the roots. Logical and unhinged. Reasonable and petulant. Generous and anarchic. We are all this, we are all this together. Often in seriatim, more often overlap...

"I have woken nights thinking of her and then turned into myself to dream other things. She’s in my mind but like shifting sands."   'Belonging' is a word which fills us up. It gives agency to us, a sense of community. We feel attached to kindred souls.   It could be with people who we connect with because of a commonality of interests or service, in which case we would be driftwood, sailing where...

"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...