An Introvert Goes to a Party.

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Tonight, I’d rather be home
getting lost in antique spines.
Craving the casual, yoga pants
and T-shirt. .Ditching this party
and dress. I can’t relate to
razzle dazzle, hoity toity
The desire for loud. My
symphony has always
been quiet.

These people
are a splinter in my isolated
hope chest for one. They
are a complex Allegory of
celebratory nothingness
Outward they glimmer
Inward, just a flicker.

I’m my own mistress of
distraction, mapping out
a poem in my head,
as some fool
in a too tight corset
tells me stories
about her latest boyfriend
who has a love for the
voluptuous and shallow.
The latter is just
an assumption on my
part.

As the clock ticks
inside my head,
sounding more
like bedtime, bedtime,
than tick tock. I note
the exit, I must reach
it before I’m tempted
to try hemlock.

I escape into wallpaper
border and sit down by
a napping cat. I stencil
my name on a gravestone
of banality and toss my
party dress off a bridge

I dissolve into particles
of light and reemerge in
bathwater of blessed
tranquility. I find kismet
with my bath mate, the
one I love-Solitude

We celebrate lavender and
quiet things. Afterwards,
I put on a night gown
of silence and
climb under a blue
comforter, under the
bluest of moon.
Finding serenity
in the stillness

-Tosha Michelle

There’s NO Art in Small Talk.

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I hate small talk and how
it always leaves me
syllabically longing.
It’s tedious and exhausting.
It’s hard to get excited
about another conversation
attached to nothing.

I’d rather talk about rare books,
our literary gods,
elevator sex, Lexapro verses,
Wellbutrin,
the friendship between
Elizabeth Bishop
and Robert Lowell,
how sometimes in poetry
the pages weep,
the origins of the word
boeotian (I imagine it
stems from small talk),
how innocence can still thrive
underneath cynicism, and my
innate need to find trouble.

Conversation should be a Safari,
not a trip to the dentist.
It should be like champagne,
shaken and exploding
with bubbly decadence.
It shouldn’t make you feel bad
you haven’t died yet.
It should ravish you and leave you
feeling satiated, weeping
with ecstasy and profound knowledge.

So come sit beside me.
We can move the language
toward enlightenment and
starlight things that help
remind us why we are here.
Or we can beat our tongues
against monotony,
and discuss the weather.
If you choose the latter,
just know I am
dismembering you,
slowly and sadistically,
in my head
one syllable at a time.

-Tosha Michelle