Sublimation: A Collection of Poems

By Stuti Ashok Gupta

While the world talks about hunger, pain, parting, and staying in wait for instant sex, I quietly enter my poetrysubtle, ambivalent, and erotic (anonymous).

Poems in this book revolve around the themes of love, travel, sunsets, and seasons. It switches from extreme feminist viewpoints to humanist and existentialist perspective. The book will leave you with a feeling of deep longing for something profound. It captures the things in and around the life of a person who is trying to understand the life, someone who asks why things happen in a certain fashion and if there is meaning behind everything that occurs. A collection of poems framed in simple words to portray complex ideas and imageries with a deeper meaning. The author has named the book Sublimation because these poems are the productive and beautiful expression of her anger, her frustration, her pain, her sadness towards this ambiguous process of existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Nov 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482857382

Stuti Ashok Gupta

Stuti is a clinical psychology student pursuing her master’s from TISS, Calicut. She graduated from Christ University, Bangalore. An emerging writer, a trained classical dancer, and a dog lover, Stuti is also currently working as the national head for an NGO, Gramiksha, that works for the education of the children. She spends her time traveling and capturing mundane things.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Stuti Ashok Gupta.

ISBN:      Softcover   978-1-4828-5739-9

                eBook        978-1-4828-5738-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Partridge India

000 800 10062 62

www.partridgepublishing.com/india

Contents

All the Love

If He Watches Cartoons With You

Pastel Crayons

Jet Lag

Raw Mangoes

At the Mention of Your Name

Valentine

Ruminate

As Long as You Can

Keep Me

Run Out

On the Roads

I Love You

Release

Use You

Air

When I Met You

Of Harmony & Chaos

Voids

The Best Therapy

My Compulsions

Love Is a Heavy Word

The Moon and the Ocean

Black Hole

Eyes and Lips

Voice

Yellow Dress

Love Note

Dreams

Unknown Playlist

She's a Happy Song

Impulsive Lover

Muse

Mostly French

All the Pain

When You Left

The Last Layer of Petals

A Sea of My Own

To Look At, To Come Back To

Unchaining

Cracks

Crawling

4:37 AM

Changing Love

Another Woman's Poem

Cry

Bare Shoulder

Strings

Layers of Soot

Come Soon, You

Invite

Rooms That I Built

Whorehouse

Paranoia Is Contagious

Dusky, Disloyal Skin

All the Travel

Kashmir

Dhauladhar Range

Kerala Buses

Bangalore Sky

Boat Song

Mere Observer

Fort Kochi

A 40-Hour Train Ride

Acrimonious

Shikara

Home Is an Elusive Idea

Constellations

Indian Traffic Jam

All That in Between

Abuse

Last Words

Grey Talks

Floating Stars

Same Old Road

Things

The Fans Are Angry Tonight

Ruffle Like a Rose

Two Cups of Tea

Watching Me

Diwali

That Kid

Bad Cat

Countless Nights

Old Monk

Indian Cricket

Existential Crisis

Grocery Lists

In My Superman Pyjamas

Home

Two Lines

Just in Time

Love Exchange

New Year

Imaginary Hellos

Blue Tick Marks

Oh, Bride

Poems That Die

Outside the Box

Touch

Time Warp

Loosened associations

Destination

Silhouettes

Dead Baby Comes Alive

Seasons

Winters I

Winters II

Raindrops on My Umbrella

Slipped

Tragedies

Fall

The Same Blanket

Summer Love

Seasons I

Seasons II

Seasons III

Seasons IV

Seasons V

I will kill

Not with weapons

But with poetry.

I will kill

Without guns

But with words.

Like every poet,

I want to give people

More than one death --

No pain, no bloodshed.

I want to give people heartache

Without breakups and betrayal.

I want to give people dreams

Without sleep

Or fear that they won't come true.

Introduction

When I sat down to write the introduction, I thought, Let's refer some other works! I saw the books of Kamala Das, Rabindranath Tagore, Rumi, Gulzar and a few others. One thing common with all of them was that the introduction was written by someone else. It's true that such great authors do not require an introduction. But that's not fair, I whispered in my head -- I am required to give an introduction.

There must be thousands of books that are being published in the world and I could be adding just one more to the shelves labelled Poems in libraries and bookstores that people hardly visit in this digital age.

This book is an honest attempt to touch your heart. We all go through something in our lives, fighting it in our own heroic ways. God has designed our lives like a jigsaw, with the pieces dispersed everywhere. Life is a process of bringing all the pieces together and death is the ultimate finish line. It isn't necessary that you make sense of this jigsaw.

In Greek tragedy, Aristotle introduced the concept of hamartia which means a tragic flaw---a shortcoming in the hero. We are all consumed in our own tragedies, trying to identify the true hamartia. This collection of poems talks about my hamartia, which you---as the reader---might be able to relate to in some way or the other.

The book starts with a series of love poems and delves deeper into the idea of pain.