wishing everyone only the best in 2017.
“Maybe someday,
You’ll be somewhere
Talking to me
As if you knew me,
Saying, I’ll be home for next year, darling.
I’ll be home for next year.
And maybe sometime,
In a long time,
You’ll remember
What I had said there.
I said, I’ll be home for next year, darling,
I’ll be home for next year.”
Outside of her was history.
A shroud to the past
The living beneath a life.
beyond the open door
an engraved coin, the swell
of violins, conjured spirits,
the echos of and
etching of yesterday
The yearning for a new day.
Inside of her, dwindling reason
An endless ticking watch
The watch was her mind.
-Tosha Michelle
https://m.soundcloud.com/tosha-michelle2020/time-after-time-rawvery-raw
The past slips forward
under the door.
Slithering around on the
floor, tangled with our
muted perceptions and half
recalled facts. It’s dines
on our regrets, our annual
if only breakfast of crow.
We study it like math,
figures, we can’t quite grasp
We equate in retrospect.
under a ghost light
We ponder its multiplicity.
We survive on a broken
calculator and flashcards
that read don’t let go.
-Tosha Michelle
It feels safe to reside inside poetry. It’s my escape route.
Real and imagined.
Here I can live multiple lives
My feelings are diverse, if I tire of one emotion, there’s always another close as the ink on my hand.
Poetry holds my heart, and understands like water, I’m perpetually in transition. My words take on many forms. Some are steeped in reality. Others, solely fantasy, perhaps, live perceived in a parallel universe.
My soul never grows static in verse. My poet self, helps me gain confidence to live life as my real self, to have the courage to balance monotony and forgive the world its drudgery.
-Tosha Michelle
Some years we peel
open like a fruit.
This year an orange.
We devour the nectar
or, feeling badly for the
naked fruit, we handle
it with care.
Other years are fruitless.
We search through our
refrigerators until we find
a carton of large white.
Cracking the years open
like an egg, until the yolk
break, running through our
fingers and onto time.
-Tosha Michelle
The ground frozen,
giving winter it’s shoulder
not impressed with the cold
or its icy sword and brass
knuckles. It’s nothing the
ground hasn’t seen before.
Soon enough a warm rain
will come, and winter will
have no choice but to retreat.
Let the rain come and cover up
yards, tree trunks
Let the rivers overthrow bridges
We’ll make boats out of
billboards and give everyone
a ride.
The ground shrugs winter or
rain. It knows, when it all ends,
there’ll be nothing left but dust
No place to gather oxygen.
Soon enough there will be
nowhere to rest.
-Tosha Michelle
I could live for the sky today.
so bright and vast
Spread a blanket on the ground
Open a basket of hope
Feast on the taste of an illuminated
world, green fields
with no fences, the sun rising
over the meadow.
Devour the middle of the white
chocolate colored clouds
No one to take note of me
Serenity in the stillness
My skin alive with the melody
of the breeze slow
dancing with the golden leaves.
I sway along with the stray wind
My face dusted by
sunlight. My worries dissolving
into sweet pitch of
a heavenly October day.
-Tosha Michelle
Big ideas are everywhere,
from religion to capitalism.
There’s always someone
trying to sell us something.
I’m burnt out on the peddling.
I just want to be left on the
side of the road while I still
have a little sanity.
Let nature stand for all I believe in.
As for faith, I’ll leave that to the sun.
We all die in the end,
the good, the bad,
the blissfully indifferent.
It doesn’t matter how well
you sing the hymn,
or if you know the slogan
by memory.
Life is freshly pressed and
the creases only hold for so long.
I’d like to believe in
the lottery, mail in rebates,
and a free trip to Hawaii.
In my crisis of faith,
I have moments where I wonder
if we all just fade to dust.
Our molecules scattered
in the wind.
Left with nothing but our
collective darkness,
where there are no charge
off or loopholes.
All I know for certain
is I know nothing.
Oh to have the wisdom of Solomon.
I look for assurance
in the clouds.
Punching the fog.
I fall back on my upbringing.
close my eyes and
pray for grace.
-Tosha Michelle
My cover of “Fields of Gold”
https://m.soundcloud.com/tosha-michelle2020/fields-of-gold-vocals-and-guitar
I want to reside inside the voice
of a Tibetan monk
And be lulled to sleep by the silence.
Instead the irritating cadence
of political discourse
Uncivil and unholy
The hills alive with the sound
of madness.
The breeze tinged with malice
even the birds
feel forsaken. Aimlessly looking
for just one branch
of grace. The tree limbs breaking
under the weight of
an uncertain future.
We beseech the earth for guidance.
Warring with hot air.
Hoping the world will revolve anew.
The axis and rhetoric
spin on.
-Tosha Michelle
Everything I Never Told You 