Not even the sun saw me retreat.
I swallow my sadness whole.
You may ask what is it good for?
Where can it take me?
I need its darkness to find
the light, to show me the
way toward creativity
I draw blood from its
silhouette, and write
among its shadows.
I walk through purgatory
to find words.
A delicate concoction of arsenic
and ink mark my descent.
-Tosha Michelle
Abstract art by me.
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
The air crisp with autumn
implores the trees
and me to fall under its spell
The clouds dust the
sun away as if to say not
even grey can eradicate
such a perfect day.
The leaves even refuse
to say goodbye content to
hang around on the
ground. Devoting their last
hours to maple tips
and the call of Jack Frost.
My cares lossen by the wind
and the aesthetics
of burnt red and pine artistry.
Charmed by the earthy
scent of October.
I await a a sliver bone moon
Content with the early
dark beauty.. Its curves and edges
The voluptuous figure
of a falling fall.
-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 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
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
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
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
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
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
Everything I Never Told You 