Category: Music

And then the Frost Came

Published on by Tosha Michelle25 Comments

The clouds drank in ravens
making the pines lucid.
His shadow fell beneath
the sky. If she listened
closely, she could hear
his melodic cadence
delivering soliloquies
adrift on the wind.

He as he was
She as she became
wake. Aware.
Taking color and form.
Both somewhere between
what was there.
What’s not there. (What
was never there)

Someone you think you 
remember and can’t
quite forget.
Lost mail belonging on someone
else’s kitchen table.

The parenthesis enclosed.
No comma, no pauses.
Time takes away. Gone
in an instant particles
of the past.

She stays.
(She can’t stay)

Tired from this slow
burning off of yesterday.
That which was lost (never was)
will not become again.

She always thinks she
see gleams of him,
The one she thought
she knew,
glimpsed and then gone.

The heart can only be
deceived for so long.
The stem decimated,
drowning in crushed rose petals.
No longer powerless
to the storm.

Wind that never really
blew for her.
Easier now to withstand
His presence merely less,
but no longer wholly more.

His shadow falling,
falling into dust.
The only sound she
hears in this moment is her
voice turning into
an early frost.

To every poem there is
a time and season.
Seasons that coagulate
into lost years,
time wasted.

In this one, she scourges
the past with lyrical ease
The breeze no longer
contradicting itself.

Her pen drops ink
of ice, no longer
pointing to the sky.
The view always distorted
anyway. The final chapter
written. She no longer
cares about heart revisions. 

-Tosha Michelle

A Place to Rest

Published on by Tosha Michelle30 Comments


Every time love has visited me it has been accompanied by a death spirit. Leaving behind the chill of isolation. Yet, I know I have been blessed to love, to have loved.  After heartache, after lesson learned in tears, the chest becomes less tight, the soreness fades.

I long to look at love in a new way, while standing in its light, to be caught in its sight, to gaze up and see Orion shining.  to be joined in a long continuance. The hard candies of granite and bone. I long to live alongside love in the fervor of hope, in the heard, seen, and finally fathomable power of a soul held in place.

I want to feel the brush of love’s tenderness,  to remember the constellations I once dreamed upon. I long for a vocabulary built on the promise of truth, in a world where I know the language like I know home, residing on a strong foundation that can  prevail in the sweetness of the summer harvest and in the noon frost of winter. 

Give me a love I can dwell in. I’ve had it with uninhabitable beauty. I desire a place that suits me, a place to rest where I can finally tear the footbridge down

Tosha Michelle

Use Somebody 

Published on by Tosha Michelle25 Comments

I’ve been roaming around

Always looking down at all I see

Painted faces, fill the places I can’t reach

You know that I could use somebody.

https://m.soundcloud.com/tosha-michelle2020/use-somebody-kings-of-leon-cover-take-2

Shadow Dancing

Published on by Tosha Michelle30 Comments


Be the howling moon
or the quiet wind.

Be Orion and his
starlight shield.

Be the road with no
street signs.

Be waylaid plans;
the lost map.

Arrive on the sidewalk
without knowing where
you are going.

Be the lightning bug.
The crickets,
telling secrets to
the air.

Be the couple walking
into the privacy of
nightfall,

Be their watch. Be
their hands.

Be the cafe always
open late, slide
into the flow of
the coffee.

Be the noodle slip
off the novice’s
chopsticks. The
soup disappearing
in the bowl

Be the siren in the
distance, the choir
music filtering
through the door of
St. Michael’s

Be the
patrons leaving the
bar.

Be the drink in their
glass. The holy water
they swim in.

Turn left.
or
Turn right.

Be the narrow streets,
the high beams on a
city bus. The cab called
they waved off.

Be the cracks in
the sidewalk, the steep
stairs leading 5 floors up.

Be the bright apartment
and the glow from the
lamp light coming through
the window. Want to be
that glow. See two bodies
sways.

Be the shadow behind the
shade.

-Tosha Michelle

The Last of It

Published on by Tosha Michelle29 Comments

image

I’m always sure enough of
your rain to walk into it.

I wander, and your downpour
wanders.

You light the way
with laments and oxygen.

By nightfall the wind has
scattered you so that the
stars can peak through.

By dawn, you are the
darkness that has passed
through my eyes.

I see your shadow
stenciled in by the sun.

There’s a translucence
between us, as memories
vaporize, steaming away
the last of the rain.

-Tosha Michelle

The Awakening 

Published on by Tosha Michelle36 Comments


No longer content with the
winter life and its flannel
sleep. Self and it’s terms
finally meet

She wipes away
the frost from her soul
And sees spring illuminated
beyond the cold.
Sunlight the trinket she’s
always possesed
misplaced for awhile
shine from within.
Her sepia world
long deprived of green
become vibrant and
alive again.

She walks away in blue
with plenty of heart
by the light of her own
eyes, no longer needing
to find it in another.
The view defined by her,
and her alone.

-Tosha Michelle

Fallen

Published on by Tosha Michelle26 Comments


It began when I transcribed
the temporal glint in his eyes
as light. Content with my
my own imaginings.

Quuck to accept my own deceit.
Hungry for a time only for desire
sliced in two.

I failed to noticed when he didn’t
take the knife
And how the sky dimmed as it gave
into longing.

The bruised fruit pulled from the branch
left to adorn the grave.
Now I collect the seeds that
remain in a mason jar

My heart painted blue.
My hands stained from
the pickings.

-Tosha Michelle

The Remains

Published on by Tosha Michelle47 Comments

As the leaf whirls across
the the mercurial landscape
The wind sounding like
something injured.
Don’t chase it. Let it go.
The monochrome sky
knows lost comes
with each season’s transformation
None of us spared in the end
Why fret so?
Put on your wool coat
wander in the leaves that refuse
to vacate the ground
Make this a day best remembered not
for what has gone but for
what remains

-Tosha Michelle