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
There are two or three men
desperate for her.
They beg to see, to touch,
to give her things,
the ocean and coastal terrain.
She’d give in if her head and
heart weren’t tied
up in him, trying to teach her
body not to yearn
for a waterless hill, the tidal waste.
Seconds of minutes of hours of days
wrapped up in him
So much connected to him, it now
belongs to him.
The illusions of shooting stars in
his realm.
Tonight she can almost see the
constellation or consolation
depending on her vantage point.
Stubborn in her convictions
She clings to the his crest, illiac
and shimmering peaks
She calls for him through a
whimsical sky.
For a moment she can almost
hear his cadence
but it’s only the whiskey drenched
moans of two or three
other men answering her through
a solid earth.
Resigned to sleep now. She drowns out their sound
Knowing only in singing dreams is the puff and mist of him found.
-Tosha Michelle
“I wanna sleep next to you
But that’s all I wanna do right now.
And I wanna come home to you.
But home is just a room full of my safest sounds.
‘Cause you know that I can’t trust myself with my three A.M. shadow.
I’d rather fuel a fantasy than deal with this alone.
I wanna sleep next to you.
But that’s all I wanna do right now.
So come over now and talk me down”.
I must write to make sense
of emotions eclipsed,
sometimes before they begin.
I must write to find congruence
with those brief flashes of reality
that my heart likes
to distort in an effort
to help me live a life
that sometimes fails.
But it’s always infused with a
dysfunctional shot
of sugar and optimism.
I do my best to honor the upsurge,
but wallow in the gutter of melancholy
from poem to poem,
memory a friend and foe to
living, is cleansed through the
written word. The language
clotted by how I chose to
abandon or fashion the
hour of my regret or reprieve.
-Tosha Michelle
Tonight I want to forget
monotony and how the
washing machine is full
of a basket of drudgery
and disappointment.
Tonight, I want to spread
myself across the pages
of a dream. I want to forget
time and its incessant
reminder of how short
it is. Always bound to
its restraints.
Tonight I want the luxury
of silk sheets and camisole.
I want to lie in a sea of
classical music, to slip
under your brushstroke
and stay under until the
morning.
Tosha Michelle
Everything I Never Told You 