“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”.
Category: Photography
Reasoning
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
Unsustainable
That fall he carried his notepad everywhere.
And on those crisp evenings,
I felt him shape and merge
words with paper.
Above us an inky sky,
and I longed to be nothing
but the syntax and nuances
taking form in his mind.
I rest my head on his shoulder,
watching the swaying of his pen.
I become one with the shuddering lines,
that won’t be still.
They reach out and caress my heart.
Stalling my breath.
Touching me here and here.
For a moment, I’m what he shapes.
What he imagines.
I glimmer in edges of the dark lines,
until the words splinter from me
The lines, like the writer,
elusive as the stray wind.
-Tosha Michelle
Old Love Letters
Imagine discovering a box
of old love letters.
At first glance the language
is hard to decipher,
written in the secret code
of lovers.
A past you can barely
recall. The girl
you were long since gone.
You marvel at his
dotted Is and counterstrokes,
knowing now he had
something to hide, that he
left no clues.
But now you know to read the
movement, the pattern
of his hands. You’ll trace
the beauty and betrayal
of young love by
the placement of
the periods, the allusions
and faulty script.
The blueprint of heartache
and blue eyes.
-Tosha Michelle
No Turning Back.
The well-traveled river has been everywhere one could imagine. Discerning, dividing, cutting deep into rocks. It’s seen it all. Everything has been done and said where it comes from. Yet, it still longs to return to the sea. I dip my toes into its water. The tide pushing against me, the waves echo another time and place, and a long ago hurricane far enough away now that the river should have forgotten. Yet its heart is still filled with rhe memory of seaweed. The shore, not satisfied with the sway of the waves taunts the river. Flaunting its erosion in its face.
-Tosha Michelle
Leaving on a Jet Plane
This covet goes out to my friend Randy. Lovely woman You can find her blog here.
https://newsnotes1.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/the-i-team-the-pupils-final-examination/
I would also like to thank my friend Danny for his keyboard work and harmonies on this song.
Hope you enjoy
Alternate Endings
I always shut the door on the past,
but forget to lock it.
I still find hope in the
alternate endings, written
but yet to be shot.
My gauzy veil gets
caught in the closing
curtain every time.
I compose yesterday
in my poetry.
I find solace in fastening
myself to what was.
Binded to moments long gone.
I write text to loosen the memories,
to dissolve the unrest
inside of me.
The undertone of melancholy,
my favorite feeling,
lingers in the emphatic prose.
For a poem, I fall back
into what was.
Then I put the pen down
and give myself to the now.
Letting the presence remain
perched for the here,
on my shoulder.
Hoping, one day words
will linger in today.
Tosha Michelle
Willfully Wild
If you’re going to love,
love wilfully and wildly,
like a leaf on the wind
soaring out,
with abandon.
Burn yourself through
for passion.
Make an altar of greater than.
Praise longing and
its insanity
Love bold men,
the ones like red umbrellas
with strong wooden
handles, and a fancy inscription,
big and deep, that makes you
feel like the daintiest
of ladies out for an
afternoon stroll,
his sheltering arms
keeping out the misty rain.
Let every idea you have
be love.
Study him like
you would the curve
of the horizon.
Follow your instinct,
lose the pattern.
Go where he goes.
Don’t let the sun disappear.
Let it swell
and put him first,
draw him closer,
until he believes in you
and the sky trembles
when you touch.
Fall
Fall
into his eyes, his thighs,
the pulse of his being.
Fall into ripeness, rightness,
until time is stripped away,
and your soul is cast in
forethought. Forethought
brushed in red and heat.
Never to be an afterthought.
If you’re going love, love
willfully and wildly until
you are spent, until the stars
shatter over the white tips
of pillowcase as two lovers
fall out of God’s mouth into
rapture.
-Tosha Michelle
Doll Friend
My voice is a tiny grain
in his skull to be devoured
by vultures or fertilized by madness.
Evey morning as I rise I
pay homage to his stony
face. I read novels into
his stature that never moves
He never remembers anything
beyond his well preened shoes
I type with one eye open well
into the day. In stillness,
he stares narratives through me
Frantically , I write nightmares
in bold font until I am spent.
At midnight I place him back under glass.
My eggs firmly stored in his basket.
Why?
When I get tired.
I sometimes wonder
what’s this poetry
thing all about?
What am I writing for?
During these times
I’m usually stuck
in a creative muck,
I still don’t dare
call it a rut.
There’s no food
in the picnic basket
so I eat drudgery instead.
My mouth full of lost time.
I’m so hungry for words
that have run off
with my silk dresses.
I dream of nouns, adjectives,
and verbs, sinking
in a sea of syntax.
I try to dive in
but get stuck in the sand.
I sit along the shore
I wait. As seagulls fly
from under my bed,
my silk dresses hanging
from up above.
I reach for them
while I still can.
-Tosha Michelle
Everything I Never Told You 