Apathy is the new compassion

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Because if you are a human being,
you should try it at least once in your life,
assuming you’re already in that delinquent minority
of people who actually give a damn.

In which case it is imperative that you deny your nature.
Pay no mind to the wounded, those hurting, those living
in poverty, those abused and degraded

Your conscience might try to entice you
into fighting these wars.
Don’t be tempted to be a regime of change.
Be the most pathetic of apathetic.
Be an emphatic sack of nothing.
Become fish like with your feelings.
Let summer revolve solely around you.
Become Dionysius favorite daughter.
Affix yourself to a incubus of
laissez-faire.

Don’t have eyes that see and are able
to to derive a lesson from a flaw.
Don’t have ears that are able
to discern a cry for help
from a sports match on TV.
Don’t let your skin be alive with compassion.
Don’t feel sick in the bones
for all the horror in the world.

Let your indifference be museum quality.
Mona Lisa with a bottle of gin
and a party dress on.
Let your own selfishness uproot your veins.
Parade down the street and cheer yourself on,
while a homeless man begs for money or change.

This is how you do it. You have no time
for extreme emotions. No truths. No news.
Drink your tea, and steep yourself
into a stupor.

Sleep for years without a map.
Waste your life drooling and snoring.
The planet will spin on.
Who needs to feel the sun, the rain?
Dream toward less.

You can wake up when you’re dead.
Just don’t expect anybody
to look for you in the dark.

Don’t be surprised if your left stunned,
spinning, alone.

This is just one of the ways it could go,
if you take my advice.
I hope you can tell me another.

-Tosha Michelle

A Life-Blue

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I translate myself in poetry,
often getting lost
in the fog of my mind.
Always looking for reason
in my narrative arc.
Here I roar and rage
all I want.

My words often drip
with disdain, despair.
The story loosely based
on my life.

Some truths are
too sacred to share.
Some truths belong
solely to me.

I try to decipher
what I’m really after.
Notebooks of fire,
letters stumbling around.
The margins full
of heart lines,
trying to capture
the red hours.

My pen sits up straight
and listens to the
commands of my interior
world

Language spills out simply,
but with fervor.
I create something
that is mine.
Fangled trees and damaged grass.
My cameo of grit and grace.
I give you my light, my dark,
my counter winds.
The oracles of desire.

I give then to you
before they burn away.
before they become a valediction.

My gilded fragments
of a life in blue,
suffused with question marks.

-Tosha Michelle

You Know Who You Are

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I thought I’d post something lighthearted for a change. Don’t get use to it. 🙂

You Know Who You Are.
by Tosha Michelle

You who carry sunshine in
your hair, the sky in your hands,
and blueberry pie in your eyes

You who knows all the words
to every Chet Baker song.

Why don’t you come by my record shop?
I’ll teach you the percussive du wop

Come unearth my city plot.
Right my upside down heart
with the lilt of your melodic
voice.

Stain my soul with your graceful hands.

Sing me your red velvet tune
with not one note of sorrow.

Scrawl on my tongue
your heart song.
I’ll sing along.

Make music to a woman
not so young, but not yet old.
My mind a score of hunger.
Patterns of passion across
my face.

Don’t be afraid to improvise
summer nights composed of
bodies and sway.
Wingtip and rosehip.
We’ll create our
own tune.

The tenor sax takes the lead.
It sounds like desire,
like it won’t ever stop.

Let’s crack the night with needle and groove.
Two lovers infusing the dark with rhythm and spark.

This Year’s Death

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The year’s death is approaching
and my soul is in migration.

The breath of frost lingers
longer with each passing winter.

I sit looking out at the night,
coming down like calendar
pages falling to the floor.

The moon looks like a clock.
The wind whispers “tick tock”

The ghosts of 2015 stumble around in my backyard.

Unfulfilled dreams appear like
oracles at my front door.

I measure my loses.
I count my gains.
I write my life in blue.

Praying for the luminous dawn
of fresh beginning.

Hope diamonds the sky.
I long to dance with starlight
in a tango I’ve never danced

Hipswaying my way across
the galaxy.

Peeling off the last twelve months
like sheets.

The flakes of auld lang syne.
no longer glazing my bowl.

The skeletons of the past
under my feet.

Knowing biography is not fate.
There’s still time for revisions.

My heart quicken by the sun.
My soul renewed.

Bathe in the bright light
of a new year

-Tosha Michelle

I Love the Broken Ones

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Because I am scarred .
I find comfort in the broken ones
The flowers out of season.
The dark mornings.
The delinquent library books.
The residue that slips through.

The ones not half full but fully
shattered. The ones scarred by
bramble.

I fall toward them with open arms .

For those who are lonely, those
wandering city streets, lost.

I pack kindness in a carry on with
imperfections. The bag so full
it’s spilling over.

The challenge of life, making everything fit.

My back aches for all I tote. There
are exits all around me. The gift shop is giving away apathy.

But I’ve purchase humanity’s ticket and I’m not going back.

Realizing life is more than chiffon pie and summer afternoons.

Knowing it isn’t the sky that matters but how we fly through it.

Navigating with a fractured flight map of scars,
counter winds and all.

Compassion our wings
The destination, love.

-Tosha Michelle

Shadows of Death

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The shadow of my dead
grandfather cast itself
in my dreams some
nights.

I see his silhouette
walking down a deserted road.
I follow him for hours. Every
time I quicken my pace to
catch up, he quicken his
faster

There’s always a
ending but never a beginning.
Time refuses to fold back
Translucence wanders endlessly.
Papa’s the light darting through
my eyes.

I wonder if the dead remember?
Maybe in my dream I’m
looking for a clue that they
haven’t forgotten us,
that’s there truly is a spiral staircase to a better place.

Papa keeps moving
The bones stay quiet.
The ash refuses to speak
The moon gives me the dead eye.
What a thing to be so close
but hear no words

The night dissolves.
A squawk of a crow wakes me
My sadness steals the sun.
For now my question
remains unanswered.

-Tosha Michelle

An Apprentice of Sadness

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If you listen to the language of sadness,
you know it has much
to teach us.

There’s dignity in the monochrome
Sanctity in darkness, in the pulse
of quiet, in the rut to be dug out of
.
Sadness can be a type of burning bush,
the X on a map.
It can make the unknown, knowable.

It can help us unfold
It can rip away our untruths, like
paint torn off a congealed can,
taking skin with it.

Sadness can then suture that skin
back together.

It can birth art, music, poetry.
I write proudly with my back ink.
I take solace in words,
even the ones written in water

I choose to write my difficulties,
my grinding realities.
The fantasies under which I labor.

I write to remember-my rain of tears.
How cathartic it is when the downpour
renders everything lush and green.

Enlivening the colorful sensations of hope

I am a student of sadness so
I can become a teacher of light

-Tosha Michelle

A wonderful video for wonderful people.

This guy. This video. Check it out. It’s transformative. Be sure to follow. If you love language, literature, culture, and guys named Joseph, you won’t be disappointed

Have a great weekend. Make it one to write about.

Dr. Joseph Suglia's avatarSelected Squibs, Scrips, and Essays by Joseph Suglia

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Answering in Lyrical Sighs.

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You don’t understand
my obsession with words,
with pen and paper.

You scoff at my lyrical sighs,
my iambic heartbeat,
my free verse of thought.

You plug your ears
as I read a Shakespearean
sonnet You don’t understand:
lilac dreams, aster stars,
or the need for a backstory.

There’s no money in poetry, you say.
You can’t fathom getting paid
in the sighs of the wind,
in quiet time, in a cathartic release.

You don’t understand
how writing saves me,
how it makes me strong.
This is where I reside best.

I’ll never get the hang of
your card game of monotony.
I’m over middle management.

I’m happy to live
in what you would call
my frivolous obsessions.

I don’t want to be
underwhelmed and uninspired,
somewhere between over the hill,
and the grass is never greener.

You can be the door slamming.
The late hours, the keeping up.
Throw your money at the wall
and call it success.

I’ll sit here with my pen and paper,
listening to the wind,
through the pine trees
releasing the hurricane
beneath my fingers,
and write a poem
about something
you’ll never understand.

-Tosha Michelle

The Sky is Falling.

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If you think you are the
sun, think again.
You are the sky
holding the sun up,
trying to change the world
one dawn at a time.

Even if you don’t have time,
notice the new day.
We are so busy we forget
we’re out of milk.
We forget how we use to
hunger for a fulfilled life.

At first there was vitamin D
in excess, now just deficiency.

We can’t live if we are constantly
trying to escape our reality,
ourselves.

I’m a litany of doubts.
Wondering if I should lower
my expectations.

Maybe I’m still the sun.
Maybe the sky is your
hand.

I remember when our sky of delusions fell.
You spoke to me only in scars.

I’m trying my best to be
your nightcap, your safe route,
your whimsical merry go round.

Imagination echoes
in every chamber.
Hope lingers.

Is it enough?

The sky cries “Forget it”.
Sometimes, we are just lost.

-Tosha Michelle

My latest cover. My friend Danny requested “An American Trilogy” He also requested I sing it sans music. I did my best.

Listen to An American Trilogy (for Danny) by Tosha Michelle 2020 #np on #SoundCloud