Uncut Poetry

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

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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)

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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

As new year eves crack our worlds open into two - a past and a future - albeit as tenuous in concept as they come, deep inside we know the celebrations - like those we do for birthdays - is just messaging of mortality for all things we hold dear.
 
And embedded within that reality is our realization that the experiences and relationships we live and seek and want to linger in are what sustains and gives meaning to our breath, the limited number that we have.
 
The songs we hear together, the storms we take shelter from, the books we cry together to, the traumas we live together through. Life's fullness manifests itself in our life through our shared experiences. Moments ripen into full fruits when we experience them as summer, letting its warmth flood us into sweet submission.
 
Our lives our only half of their possibility if we consider the indulgences which enrich our lives as ordinary. Or things in passing. The kisses we steal, the hands we hold in the dark, the crook of our arms we give for rest, are more precious to remembrance when we look back than any tinsel star or success in passing. Public adulation is the worst. It engulfs us without redemption, leaving us hungrier for being there, and empty when it passes away.
 
I'm quite sure god lives his life through what we do. And I think the sensory is what he would remember, the unexpected adventure, the advent of serenity because we chose to do nothing one winter morning but sit with our ageing father to look out onto the changing skies.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beauty of things pass - 

When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train

One Summer

Rediscovering Heaven

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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 -

Liberty Quest by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/liberty-quest

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

We are privileged enough to linger in beauty without thinking of livelihood.
We spend time with the skies, linger over petunias, chrysanthemums, dahlias and marigolds as they burst in exuberance, watch a frog jump onto a lotus leaf, spend a day in Givenchy, go rapturous over a Zaha Hadid design, go pensive over a Selma poem, linger over a drying leaf in the walking path, bite slowly into the sumptuous juiciness of an Alfonso, spend a day reading a Ludlum, just sit in the winter sun.
 
I am blessed to have a mother who read poetry to me in childhood, and still points out passages which linger. My legacy to my boy, and to those who spend time with me, has always been to point out, read with, talk about the riches strewn all over our universe, things which make life worth living. Going high on a swing, playing cricket in the burnished neighbourhood field, hang on the balustrade of a verandah as we see the summer sun throw a million colours into the lakes beside our house.
 
When we travel, we do so in beauty. Van Goghs we love, local Banksys, rapturous sunrises we travel miles to see, music concerts we see from the fan pit, ruins whose stories we listen with rapt attention, theatre we see, discuss and then discuss again. And the poetry and the books, which are sewn into the fabric of our breath.
 
And the people, our people we love and refuse to take for granted, the people who we don't know but who are all universes in themselves. All who can be portals, gurus, path seekers or companions. These are the ones who make all the difference in our search for what is most precious to the sublime thing called life.
 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on beauty we find in our worlds - 

Rediscovering Heaven

When We Were One With The Stars

Kintsugi

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 -

You & Me Forever by Musiclfiles
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/you-&-me-forever

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