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Finding Home in Places We've Left Behind
Revisiting a place where one has one's roots is tricky business. On the one hand, there is enough familiarity - relatives, school chums as unrecognisable adults, hazy lines of playgrounds, peacocks, changing views from rooftops, familiar cracks now deeper - and on the other, one enters the familiar as a complete stranger. The air is lighter, the light is sharper, the language is alien in spite of familiar intonations, and one sits on judgement. And a sense of superiority emerges - as if the place I've settled in is not only different, but also way 'ahead', whatever the meaning of that word is. But the bigger tragedy is how we look at what was hometown, nay home, is now a place to judge, to compare, to find it falling short. We move on in life - whether it indicates moving forward is a moot point. What does linger is what we leave behind. Sometimes as a place stuck in a time-wrap, sometimes merely reluctant to find new beats, happy in its anachronisms. Sometimes as people, who are happy to remain what they are, tiny dreams ensconced in comfortable immobility. And that is a choice to be happy in one's own quiddities, within one's particularities. And who are we to judge, just because we have found different dreams, racier trajectories, more informed choices. If finally what we as human beings seek is serenity and fulfilment, how do we even know whether that is there in the places and people we have left behind? In our desire to know ourselves better, it is often a good idea to haul ourselves back to our roots, and then just sit back and see ourselves implode, explode, sink or float. If nothing else, we will get to know ourselves better. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ways we find and lose homes - Finding Home in Broken Places Finally Home A Home as an Open Dream 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 - Rising Sun by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Rising-Sun Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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When it Rains, Love Slips
Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances. Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is presumption. Of course we know when we are in love and when we are pretending: when we carry wounds like a fireball hidden inside. So much of love is the warmth of a glance as also the heartbreak of a look avoided. The shadow of love is often fraught with short-term memory. We remember the last outtake, the last remark, the last deed. The fractured nature of our feelings, invariably, leads us astray into judging love as a finality, defined as that last piece of interaction, forgetting the warmth, the light and the wonder of what it meant for so long. Of course, we drift, of course we are flooded, of course we are castaways in our own opinions, of course we are prisoners of minutiae, even as the big picture looms large beckoning us into its now-fading glory. Our obsession with the now and the just-elapsed, makes us error-prone, subsuming us in its shallow currents. We lose the perennial for the ephemeral. And even as we sit at the shore, we drown in innocuous backdrafts. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the way we romance rains and storms - Dancing in the Rains Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms & Lovers in Spate Waiting for a Storm 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 - Artemis by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Artemis Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Lovers Who Synchronise (& those who don't)
Pondering as I do on relationships, the beauty and brokenness of them, I continuously marvel, nay wonder, at both their tenacity and tenuousness. And how, at the bottom of them all, they all exist on the basis of a single decision: to be together. However old, however strong, whatever the optics, the couple is together only because they want to be. Years might slip by, a thousand experiences might be shared treasure, but a single call, a sentence, a simple "I want to leave you", and a bond collapses. And it doesn't require a calamity, another love, incompatibility or differences, for that decision to be made, enunciated and executed. We, as humans, are victims to so many things - possessiveness, insecurities, jealousies, emptiness. And then history doesn't matter. And a separation just happens. The question always is - what right do we have in or to each others lives? What is the value of a paper signed as ritual, or a promise made to love each other forever. And that's why I'm in awe of people who not only stick together for years, but do it with equanimity and a quiet happiness. I see couples who gel with each other with such felicity that when they are together, when they speak, when they share silences, they do it as one. It's almost as if there's no distance in their souls. That, without meaning, somehow, some place, they simply got split, though they were one body, one spirit, one soul. Their presence is a generosity, and an answer to my own cynicism about the future of long-term coupledom. If only we go beyond the surface gnarls, flaws, habits and blemishes, so much is possible. Such serenity is garnered, if only we realize the minimising effect of expectation, and see each other as flawed creatures of infinite possibilities. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the ebbs & flows of love - A City Made of Our Sighs Distances: Kaifi Azmi Ke Liye On Breaking Up (Without Breaking) 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 - The Day After Tomorrow by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/the-day-after-tomorrow Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Just Be Air
We don't always realize, how much of our lives belongs to others, is determined by others. Their concerns, their insistences, their jealousies, their phobias, their happinesses, their frustrations. Their blank stares, their under-the-breath comments, their lack-of-joy. Their obsessions, their obsessive need to control. Their potential reactions, their prejudices, their silences. In time, what we do, indeed, what we become, is a factor of what someone else might want us to be. Covering the entirety of our realities is the miasma of overwrought anticipation. What would she say? What would she think? How would she react? Would she agree? Decisions then genuflect to a person and not to the situation. And this subsummation is complete when, in time, we forget what we want. In the extreme case, we look to the person for everything we want to say, want to do, and even asking "is this what I want?" This genuflection is ultra-common with Personality Type A people who naturally assume that the world revolves around them - else it would collapse under its own incompetencies. The cost is severe. Allegiance generated is tenuous. And even if such a person is ultra-intelligent, she will find herself to be her greatest enemy. Thus unhappiness is not always generated, it is excavated, gathered. As if we go into a meadow to obsessively pluck thorns instead of flowers for a bouquet. Relationships invariably require a light touch. The bonds, paradoxically, become stronger when they are tied in gossamer. The responsibility to a relationship comes not from insistencies of history or law or sacrifice. It is far subtler. The strongest ties come from discovery, curiosity, space, respect. Relationships are never simple. And we do not always help in making them simpler for ourselves. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the gossamer nature of relationships - Quietly Yours Lovers as Witnesses I Fell in Love With You (Again) Beside the Tin of Sardines 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 - Evacuation by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Evacuation Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
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Waiting
People drift. Love leaves home. Life becomes a refugee. We become migrants in our own cities. What brought two people together often becomes the reason which tears them apart. Poetry is often a glue, often it it only a record-keeper. Often it is a bystander, checking out its own pulse. And the two who loved how poetry defined them, find the suburbs of love - where they finally have to settle - to be boring brick-laden homestays. So much of love - as of life - are the boring intermezzos. When definitions of everything get recreated inside endless vistas of nothingness. What survives is cacti, or becomes prickly like it. Our best selves dry out. And we become our worst versions. We are very rarely sensitive enough to know how we have regressed, how we have devolved. We see our sunburnt smiling faces in the mirror, and then go cursing into the arena of life, desperate for distraction, despairing to know where we'd gone wrong. If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on relationships which are adrift - Finding Myself Beyond You Living Inside a Wound Perpetrators & Victims of Love 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 - Sayan 21112020 by Sayan Mukherji
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