Tag: music

Delicate Decadence 

Published on by Tosha Michelle47 Comments


Poetry never visits me

dressed in lace

Sipping a colorful drink

Singing and swaying

to a happy tune.

Instead, poetry likes to weep

in my ear, turned out

in black with a bottle

of scotch

Miles Davis on replay.

There’s happiness in me

to be written, to be lived.

I’m never as melancholy

as my writing would suggest.

Joy is just waiting to be

unfolded like a love

note hidden in dresser

buried under layers of clothes.

One day I’ll give into

nostalgia and find solace

in the lyrical prose.

It’s just there so much art and beauty

in the exquisite feeling of

sadnes. My strictured soul

finds solace in its untamed

sweetness. Its bluesey notes

lnown to me, heard by me,

sung by me, felt by me.

The delicate decadence

-Tosha Michelle

Ode to Grass Stains and Wildberries

Published on by Tosha Michelle131 Comments

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We create our own joy.
Come roll around with me
in the grass til our
clothes are stained.
Til the clouds turn violet.

Let’s eat ice cream under
the stars and hold each other
until the restlessness dissipates.
Tonight let’s not battle the hardwood floors,
the laundry chute, or the dishes.

Let’s defy gravity, monotony,
the drudgery of life.
Throw away the map.
Let’s find another way.
Eat the wild berries.
Live on the breeze.
Amp up the brightness of
the moon.
Who cares if the universe
complains?

Let’s create a language
that fits us, in a land
of pine cones and sage.
Red dress on the ground
where desire stays.

Nouns infused with passion
tongue, earlobes, necks..
Shuttering hands, quivering bodies.
The sentences of ourselves.
Infinitives, unearthing new verbs
and their allure.

Upgrading our love
to a window seat in first
class.

Rethinking how.
Reordering now.

-Tosha Michelle

Just Go

Published on by Tosha Michelle37 Comments


Flowers of what is pollinated
by bees of what might have
been. Mundane afternoons married
to evenings of TV and ringtones
that have forgotten how to ring.
An old journal reminds her
it’s not too late
to resurrect a dream or lost
shimmer, to right her caddy-corner
heart left askew by
a lover’s hands. She grasps
for the notes under air,
leaving the past to glide
past and out the door.
She bows to the cartography of light
and presses the guidebook to
her chest. Knowing it’s time
to rise and go, to spiral out
into the unmoored and unknown.

-Tosha Michelle

This Year’s Death

Published on by Tosha Michelle30 Comments

The year’s death is approaching
and my soul is in migration.

The breath of frost lingers
longer with each passing winter.

I sit looking out at the night,
coming down like calendar
pages falling to the floor.

The moon looks like a clock.
The wind whispers “tick tock”

The ghosts of 2017 stumble around in my backyard.

Unfulfilled dreams appear like
oracles at my front door.

I measure my loses.
I count my gains.
I write my life in blue.

Praying for the luminous dawn
of fresh beginnings.

Hope diamonds the sky.
I long to dance with starlight
in a tango I’ve never danced

Hipswaying my way across
the galaxy.

Peeling off the last twelve months
like sheets.

The flakes of auld lang syne.
no longer glazing my bowl.

The skeletons of the past
under my feet.

Knowing biography is not fate.
There’s still time for revisions.

My heart quicken by the sun.
My soul renewed.

Bathe in the bright light
of a new year

-Tosha Michelle

Music For Sunday ❤️

Published on by Tosha Michelle7 Comments

“This is our life
These are our friends
This is our family that grows and bends.
This is our chance
This is our time
This is us making things to somehow leave behind
What  will we leave behind to show
That this is our life”

Here, There is Pixie Dust

Published on by Tosha Michelle108 Comments

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Sometimes I am only interested in small things.

The chocolate bar, a hot bath.
The turned down corner of a book page, the beauty of the sky.

This is not unhappiness.
Yet, still I dress in layers
of sorrow.

I wrap a scarf around my heart like a tourniquet
to keep the darkness from bleeding out.

It’s winter inside of me,
but the frost has not yet taken over.
My soul still hints of blue birds,
jazz notes, Monet paintings.

My soul attuned to spring.
I hide it in the closet for later.

It’s always a balance regardless of the season.

There’s still daisies in need of planting, leaves in need of raking.

Tonight, restlessness breaks
like a coconut, open windowed,
near.

Where is serenity?
For weeks its been walks, poetry and Miles Davis.

I grow stranger with each passing year,
more sensitive, more aware.

I long to flame the wind
with a strike of a match
only it knows.

I long to praise the weeds, the wildflowers.
Who’s to say which is which?

I’m still seeking glitter, the pull of a sliver boned moon,
the litter of pixie dust.

Now before Neverland becomes never.
Now before life is tossed downriver,
spinning in time’s current.

My restless heart, wait to be taken away,
beyond the window, to starlight things.

To design a language I can dance to,
to find kismet in avoiding the side steps and serenity in the fall.

-Tosha Michelle