Uncut Poetry

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,
 
Sometimes you just know.
 
As someone once said "I knew you were the one, as soon you walked into the room. There was light coming out of your ass!" Frankly, more often then not, love has less drama associated to its arrival, because it is really a feeling which grows and found incrementally, one conversation at a time, one walk at a time, one infraction at a time.
You know there's something happening inside you when there's an unexplainable feeling of excitement and queasiness and anticipation which starts to brew inside.
 
Why queasy, I have often wondered. And the only answer I get is that you start feeling that you are losing control. And it makes you nervous, helpless. But it's a feeling you enjoy, giving into it is akin to some other power taking control of how you feel and act. The more irrational the act you see yourself do, the more you see yourself say things which you didn't know you were capable of saying, the more you realize you are in the power of something transcendental. Something which will now never leave you unscathed or unchanged.
 
Love has made an entry.
 
Life as you know it ceases to exist. Sometimes infinitesimally, sometimes significantly, you find yourself change. Even when the high fades, and love becomes a normal part of what you live with, there's a glow which never leaves you. Even as obsession tapers into normalcy, you know your life is forever touched with magic.
 
The most significant change comes as you stop thinking in singular terms. Is it freedom curtailed, or life enchanted for its inclusion? If there's excitement inside thinking of experiences together, then you are on the way to a twosome. Plurality is only acceptable with its promise of shared experience if one does not consider sharing an encroachment or a loss of freedom.
 
Because love is, in so many ways, an acceptance and an accumulation. It's the difference between being breathless and gasping for breath. In that thin line of differentiation, lies the richness of our choices and the changeability of everything we stand for in life.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the progression of love - 

I Come With Mud

I Said I Love You First

Quietly Yours

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on [email protected]
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Angels by Sascha Ende

Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Angels
Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I reach the summit.
 
Not inch by inch—no, I arrive in a flood. Talent spills out of me. Love follows, tidal and unquestioning. Directors orbit me like obedient moons; they cannot imagine a world without my sound. I do not merely compose music—I alter its grammar. I am told I am a miracle. I begin to agree.
 
This is where it breaks.
 
Because admiration, once mistaken for destiny, hardens into entitlement. I begin to believe the applause is owed, not earned. That the place I clawed my way to is permanent, immune to time, taste, or doubt. I convince myself I can offer anything—anything at all—and the world must bow and call it genius. If it doesn’t, the fault lies with the world. They don’t understand music. They don’t understand me.
 
Power arrives quietly. I let it.
 
I summon directors and leave them waiting in the dark, hours stretching thin, just to feel my own gravity. I choose sacred backdrops for first meetings, mistaking symbolism for sanctity. I give indifferent music to a good film and dismiss its failure as “divisive,” because nothing I touch is allowed to be mediocre—only misunderstood.
 
Lines I never meant to draw begin to appear everywhere.
 
Faith, identity, difference—these become instruments too, played without care. When someone enters my home carrying another god, another grammar of devotion, the air tightens. Symbols are stripped, not violently, but casually. As if it is obvious, as if it is necessary. As if genius grants permission.
 
My arrogance is no longer an accident. It is deliberate. Curated. Non-negotiable.
 
I do not spare those who built me. The directors who trusted me when I was still a question mark. The collaborators who believed music was a conversation, not a sermon. One by one, they drift away—not in protest, but in fatigue. Projects thin out. Invitations dry up.
 
And the music—ah, the music.
 
It stumbles. It repeats itself. It loses hunger. But how would I know? I am sealed inside a fog of my own praise, a mausoleum of old triumphs. Self-awareness was buried years ago, quietly, without ceremony.
 
So when the world starts turning elsewhere—towards younger, leaner, less reverential talent—I am stunned. Betrayed. How dare they move on from me?
 
Then comes the mirror I choose because it flatters my wounds.
The foreign interviewer. The sympathetic gaze. The easy narrative. I explain my fading relevance with a single, convenient sentence: it isn’t decline, it’s persecution. Not exhaustion, but exclusion. The industry, I say, is communal. I am being punished for who I am.
 
I believe this because it costs me nothing. It asks nothing of my craft, my humility, my failures.
 
And even when someone who has known me—who has admired me—looks at me and says, almost gently, almost in disbelief, “My god, I never even realised you were Muslim,” the truth still does not land. Because by then I am too deep inside my grievance to hear anything else.
 
I mistake isolation for martyrdom.
 
I retreat into the smallest room imaginable: the ghetto of my own frustration. Religion, the last refuge of the unimaginative and the cornered, becomes my alibi.
 
What I do not see—what I may never see—is the scale of the loss.
 
The hearts that once beat in time with my music and now feel nothing. The silence in concert halls where tickets were bought with devotion and abandoned with disappointment. The audience that did not turn hostile—they simply stopped coming.
 
That is the true heartbreak.
 
Not that I fell. But that I never understood why.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on failures & hypocrisies of people  - 

Mr Hoskote, have you visited Kashmir recently?

Of Failing & Falling

Will We Ever Trust the Skies Again

Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on [email protected]
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Relaxing Piano Improvisation by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/relaxing-piano-improvisation

Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

We have to step out of our lives to see what is in the great beyond. Often just outside our gated communities are worlds we know nothing of, lives being lived in ways which we cannot conceive of. Rich, varied, textured, tumultuous. Often beautiful because they are unfiltered and often bleed; frightening because they are so raw.
 
When we encounter these lives, these stories,  we are aghast at their truths and trajectories. They are so rich in their lived-in textures that our own lives seem bland and empty.
 
That's why I love talking to strangers. For their tales and their lives. Each person is a universe, a cornucopia of dreams and desires, often of unrelenting courage, often of failure, anguish and hope.
 
We are woven together through our common place on earth. However much we might think ourselves as special, we are purveyors of the same resources, prisoners to the same gravities, trying to make our lives out of what we have been bequeathed, trying to make more out of what we've got.
 
And when we do this interaction, we are twice blessed - one, when we give the grace of understanding the other, and when we lay ourselves open and vulnerable with own stories.
 
We all want to do well. We all want to do better. But when someone shares tales and hope with us, we are part of the same family of humankind.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how a life is made of so many beautiful things - 

Lemonade at the End of a Buzzing Day

Just Be Air

Stealing Beauty

Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on [email protected]
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Winterland by Frank Schroeter
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/winterland

Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Why don't we have honest conversations with the ones we love the most? Why don't we listen - really listen - without comments, without reply, without retort - when they attempt to tell us what hurts, where it hurts, and how the hurt devastates them.
 
So much of the pain we cause, and we feel, is avoidable. Not because we don't tell enough - but because we don't listen enough. The smallest of things becomes intractable, our understanding of what things mean have no relationship to what it actually meant. We don't clarify, we conclude, and are damned for it.
 
Bridges which connect love become chasms, and we stand at both ends and wonder - what happened, how did two beautiful people find their worst selves in the relationship which mattered the most.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the dissonance in relationships  - 

A Love Letter from a Frustrated Husband to an Exasperated wife

A Primer on How to Deal With (Being) Hurt

Lovers Who Synchronise (& those who don't)

Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' 

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on [email protected]
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Sehnsucht by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/sehnsucht

Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Poems have a way of showing truths and making us recognize what we are often blind to - that the best we have is adequate and the worst we think we are can also be beautiful.
There is so much we lose out to life because of our fears - of what we think we are, of what others might think we are, of what the world thinks when we fail.
 
The sad truth is - nobody cares. Everybody is immersed in their own stories, and beyond a flurry of gossip, have scarcely any mind space for anybody else.
 
Only the ones who care for us, are the ones who feel for us, in ways which are genuine and true and beautiful.
 
And when they hold us close, in spite (and often because) of what we are, we become the beauty they see in us, we are rendered marvellous, we see the infinite in ourselves because that is the core of us - the boundless possibility, the opening of a flower inside us, the feeling of being with the divine, of being blessed.
 
And all because someone found us worthy of time, of attention. Of a sliver of love. Maybe a poem.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how we blossom into the person we should be - 

Lemonade at the End of a Buzzing Day

I Have Watched You Make the Ordinary Holy

When We Know Love as Found

Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on [email protected]
 
The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Feelings 2 by Frank Schroeter
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/feelings-2

Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license