An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, edited a magazine – ‘Words Surfacing’, authored seven volumes including ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’. His works have been translated in ten languages. 

Find and follow him at amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet

Be Radha, She Wrote On The Back

In the blue light
one can almost see
the traces of semen and Radha
on the heart's Stockholm floor.

"Be Radha in your life next!
You say, as a suspended hex,
as if that sanctifies
the act, cold tiles of your heart-locker
where love is made to promise
an end of freewill, as if this frees
the captor and heals the captive
and defines the four corners of yearning.

In the blue light heart can be seen,
a graph of the feeble and strong throbbing,
signatures scribbled on the reverse
side of a social contract (Do you recall
the words of Butler?).

"Be the wick", you curse the flame.
Flesh burns some days,
and some days it lives, but without
a memory. You say, "You're Radha.",
but it is not quite the truth, is it?

 

*Imagine the Hindu myth of Radha and Krishna from a suffragette angle.

Body

The one I desire,
the woman
within this flesh of mine,

births a daughter
inside my id,
and we nurse her

somewhere (no,
I can provide you the specifics,
in my skull-attic),

and even with
all my headstrong bones
we remain afraid -

these are the days
of the daily news of rapes.

I whisper in my ears -


All are inside, demons and slayers,
mirrors, stars and
shards in the sand.

My bleeding footprints
shall be worshipped
by me, a man with a woman
on his chest.

Time Has It Hands On The Fire and The Frost

The bird, I imagine,
asks how long the bard'll
go on scrivening
about those stolen kisses he missed
as a young man.

From the street beneath
my verandah, a vagrant
upturns his palms. Money?
No, he shows his scald.
Time has touched
both the fire and the frost;
does the man feel
the veins swelled with the pride
for his battle marks?

Almost spring, the bipolar wind
inoculates two minds
I think with, and I think about
the bird of the morning
and the man without a home,
and those two minds fight
against the starry starry night
and chasing crows inside.

Time feeds two serpents.
Some rumours of the summer
lure you to open the curtains.
A flyer flies in. Don't pick up.
I scream. We didn't discover
any vaccine for belief.