I try to nail sunlight
to paper.
Instead, I always
capture rain.
The light is so elusive.
It won’t even scribble
its initials on my
waterlogged pages.
The darkness is
never shy.
It always invites
itself in.
My pen has been
swimming in
its ocean for
quite some time.
I dive to bottom
of a well written sea.
The light remains
unread.
-Tosha Michelle
Hope at times seems
to drift and waft at a distance.
Nothing more than
stray wind on my neck. My
saltless palms
trying to grasp its alluring scent.
On damselfly wings,
it soars on the breeze, passed
my open window.
Sweeping the white clouds,
while dancing on
the edge of the horizon.
Moving to the tune of prayers,
palms of faith.
The creature of
someone else’s mind.
Speech unwoken and
without weight to tether it
to the ground.
It floats here,
just out of reach.
Dim. Quietly,
with heavy laden eyes.
I’m glad to have not lost its aura
entirely, but to see it
move at the sky’s whim.
Hope resting on the updraft.
I wait here
on my knees, expectant, dreamily,
mournfully, with the
skin of my unclothed heart for
its downpour.
-Tosha Michelle
Disclaimer. The following is not an attack on Christianity. It is simply a commentary on the hypocrisy of self professed Christians who only seem to advocate fear, hate, and intolerance. I’m also a bit perplexed over the demonizing of Starbucks cups and peace-loving Muslims. Note, the only religion terrorists know is hate
Dear Potentially Clueless,
Your rally cries taste like stale coffee.
You with your righteous indignation.
You who think your religion is the only one that matters.
You who have cleansed your lips with hate.
The sheerness of your nothingness confounds me.
I want to cover my mouth and nose to avoid your plague.
Where did your humanity go?
Do you really ask yourself what would Jesus do?
Do you even care anymore?
When did the Bride of Christ turn into the whore of intolerance?
The beauty of the cross lies
in forgiveness, love, compassion.
Your kisses say razors,
blackened moss, barbed wire fences.
They scream Judas.
You love your religion more than God.
Do you not understand how your
sanctimonious songs will never
resonate hope or faith?
Your notes are shrills,
an emphatic kind of
warning in the undertone.
You sacrifice your Christianity
on the altar of ignorance and ego.
As I write, I’m afraid I’m becoming what I loathe.
I never want to fall into what I once was.
What I want is change. I want you to be changed.
I want to drink from the red cup of sunshine,
to eat the good fruit.
I want to know that the world is made up of possibilities.
I wait for a world where love falls like snow,
where halos slide down slopes of imperfections.
A world where God forgives our folly
and grace overshadows our need for holiness.
A world where my skin comes alive with the pitch of tenderness.
Where the green leaves are dewy,
and hope becomes a shivering, tangible thing.
Until, then I’ll sip from my red Starbucks cup
and let serenity diffuse in my mouth.
The bride of caffeine and open eyes.
-Tosha Michelle
Praying for Paris and our world.
NY Times Best Selling Author and my favorite enigma Sylvain Reynard was gracious enough to write a guest blog on poetry. If you aren’t familiar with Reynard’s books,you are missing out on riveting tales full of suffering, sex, love, faith, and redemption. You can find out more about SR and his work by going to http://sylvainreynard.com/ You can also find him in all his tweeting glory @sylvainreynard
This poet is a huge fan. You will be too.
Now I give you SR in his own words
_____________________________________________
Many people avoid poetry.
Poetry usually brings to mind limericks, or schoolyard sing-songs, or angst-driven blank verse. But The Iliad and The Odyssey are poems. Dante’s The Divine Comedy is a poem.
Poetry is extremely flexible as a genre and like other arts it contributes something important to the human experience. Poetry can be a thing of beauty and a medium for reflecting on profound and sometimes unsettling truths.
When I wrote The Gabriel Series, I was inspired by the poetry of Dante, hoping to introduce the beauty of his art to a wider audience. Dante is not very well known anymore and few people read him outside of school or university.
In my new Florentine Series, I was inspired by the poet Apuleius’s account of the love affair between Cupid and Psyche. Again, this is a poem that is not very well known and infrequently read.
You can read the tale by starting here: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/TheGoldenAssIV.htm#anchor_Toc347999726
Psyche was the youngest of three sisters and very beautiful. Her beauty was so great, it intimidated prospective suitors. Her older sisters quickly found husbands, while Psyche remained alone.
Her father feared that Psyche had been cursed by the gods and so he sought out an Oracle, who instructed him to deliver his daughter up to marry a great winged evil. In sorrow and despair, the father obeyed. Psyche went along with the Oracle’s instructions, proclaiming that her condemnation was the result of unbridled envy.
And then something surprising happened…
“…prompted by the sight of the evening star, Psyche retired to bed. Now, when night was well advanced, gentle whispers sounded in her ears, and all alone she feared for her virgin self, trembling and quivering, frightened most of what she knew nothing of. Her unknown husband had arrived and mounted the bed, and made Psyche his wife, departing swiftly before light fell. The servant-voices waiting in her chamber cared for the new bride no longer virgin. Things transpired thus for many a night, and through constant habit, as nature dictates, her new state accustomed her to its pleasures, and that sound of mysterious whispering consoled her solitude.”
Psyche was delivered up to someone, but far from treating her evilly, he treats her well. He gives her pleasure. He loves her body. But he only comes to her at night, so she has no idea who he is.
The oracle prophesied of a great winged evil, but her husband reveals himself as a tender, attentive lover, who truly cares for her. One evening, he speaks to her,
“Sweetest Psyche,” he said, “my dear wife, cruel Fortune threatens you with deadly danger, which I want you to guard against with utmost care. Your sisters think you dead and, troubled by this, they’ll soon come to the cliff-top. When they do, if you should chance to hear their lament, don’t answer or even look in their direction, or you’ll cause me the bitterest pain and bring utter ruin on yourself.”
Psyche subsequently is faced with a dilemma – should she trust her husband’s actions and how he treats her, or should she trust the judgments of her family and the Oracle.
Psyche knows what it is like to be judged on appearance alone, without regard to her character. Suitors shunned her, because she was thought to be too beautiful and too perfect – like a statue. In the poem, it looks as if she places all her trust in appearances as she strives to discover her husband’s identity, not trusting that his actions have revealed his true character.
But what would looking on his face reveal? Would it make his actions a lie? Psyche doesn’t stop to reflect on her husband’s nature. If he were truly monstrous, he’d treat her badly and not kindly. He loves her and brings her pleasure and she seems to enjoy his company, although she is plagued with doubt. Her doubt, however, reveals a fatal flaw in her character – she cannot trust her judgment of her husband based on his actions; she must judge him based on his appearances. This fatal flaw will be her undoing …
You can read the rest of the story through the link I posted above.
I deal with similar themes in “The Prince” and “The Raven,” and also the next book in the series “The Shadow.” The male and female leads find themselves in a situation where they end up having to trust one another’s characters rather than outward appearances. Indeed, the importance of having a good character is one of the themes of the novels, along with love, sex, hope, and redemption.
I welcome your comments on the myth of Cupid and Psyche and I hope that you will take time for beauty and poetry in your daily life. – SR
If your going to love,
love wilfully and wildly,
like a leaf on the wind
soaring out,
with abandonment.
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
My cover of The Eagles “Desperado” for Sunny Day
I love my dead relatives
like I love the broken
spine of my favorite book
I love the bent back pages
and the sad dust cover
of ruin. I’ll never discard
it. I take it out often and
bookmark it in memories.
In the chapters, I want the
words to live again. No
matter how many times
I reread the text, there is
no next scene.
I hope it plays out in
another dimension.
I’d like to think some things
are like this.
The morning light casts a
glow upon the cover,
giving it an angelic gleam.
Who could not admire the
beauty of a well loved book?
Wreckage made by years of
reading favorite passages
over again, and who could
not mourn, the sudden shock
when the pages begin
to fade?
-Tosha Michelle
October is the month for praise;
the beauty before winter’s gray.
It blushes the clouds with pink,
and paints the leaves canary.
The air so crisp and busy,
still warm from summer’s memory.
The sun brush stroked in red
streaking through the trees,
before their abundance
is carried away.
October is the month for praise.
Before a somber dullness
takes over.
Turning the days into
unkind nights,
when every thought we have
is nostalgic
October is fall’s long
stem rose;
trying to right the
wrong of December’s chill,
and mother nature’s
stony stare.
The red rose rises up,
as if to make amends
for what will become
of the bees and ants,
and all of us who strive
to live harmoniously;
those condemned to ice
and Jack Frost’s
fixation with noses.
October is the month to praise,
so we offer up our apple
cider alleluias,
in the field of the great pumpkin,
and await winter’s bitter thud.
-Tosha Michelle
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
I sometimes long to be a
name no one answers, a
name that no longer
tolerates humanity. I yearn
to take the wintery chill
of my mind and go off by
myself, to live in a great
empty space, where
the breath of solitude can
falls on me like clouds,
-The only greeting needed
the green grass. I long
to belong to none, to be
elusive as residue.
The sun in my arms,
the only embrace I
need.
Then (as it always is)
Someone asked
“so how you been?”
How quickly the name
answers.
-Tosha Michelle
In London, I finally
understood to be happy,
I can’ t regret. I can’t
be the ballerina in
a box waiting for
someone to turn
the key, trapped on
a platform of fear.
The key belongs to
me. I am the music.
I chose when I dance.
I discovered this while
navigating my way around
the city.
I became wanderlust in
leather boots, pleasantly,
disoriented by the
history. The city itself
a museum. On my own
for the first time. Alone,
with the wind of my mind.
I started to realize
that this “delicate” little
flower could survive
without water, that it
could grow anywhere.
I didn’t know it then
but my own history
was falling into place
as if Aristotle had flown
in from Greece (by way of
Great Beyond Air) to
help me make sense
of life.
It’s the little things
that change us,
that help us gain
knowledge of ourselves
the self that sometimes
needs to shatter.
Getting lost in
Greenwich Park
Sitting on a bench
unseen in the fog.
The bird that refused
my bread.
(The little bastard)
I swear I heard him chirping
stop trying to be responsible
for fixing everyone
Sitting in a cafe debating
the work of Turner after
visiting the Tate.
Just missing the
train for the airport.
Stopping by the gift
shop selling postcards
of London Bridge and
plastic keychains, making
me realizes I’ve had
enough of disposables.
Waltzing into pubs
and new situations.
Dizzy from dancing.
and finally believing
I knew the steps
Finally understanding
the beauty of missteps.
-Tosha Michelle
Everything I Never Told You 