Tag: relationships

How to be an Expert at Life.

Published on by Tosha Michelle116 Comments

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Praise imperfections.
Ask questions.

Don’t fear the answers.
Do fear snakes, toads,
and Donald Trump’s hair.

Adore books, animals,
weaknesses, the broken,
and growing older.

Find a love to orbit around.
Have a constellation seeking brain.
A heart that star gazes.

Don’t trip on what’s been
gone for years.

Walk hand in hand with today.

The one seemly not
telling the truth is
the one you should
listen to the hardest.

Pay attention to your
conscience, make
sure it’s really yours.

Know there’s beauty;
in words. The ones
you use and the ones
you leave out.

Read the classics.
Brighten to artistry
Don’t be afraid to improvise.

Listen to jazz while
drinking iced coffee.

Don’t admire yourself
too much, this can
lead to disaster.

There are two types
of people in the world,
be neither of them.

Know sometime what
seems useless is
full of meaning.

Learn how to bend,
not break.

Lose yourself to love,
to madness.
Always carry a suitcase
full of mischief.
A passport of adventure.

Don’t forget to add a dash of moonlight.
Season the nights with heat.

Create the scene.
Live it.

Lose your shoes and inhibitions.

Split the wishbone.

Know nothing important
comes with a manual.

Just because your
spirit is tangled,
doesn’t mean your
soul has to be tied in a knot.

Be full of vigor,
meaningful chit chat
and chocolate. Lots
of chocolate!

Know there is holiness in the missteps.
Grace in the fumbles.

Remain unfinished.
Be the light.

-Tosha Michelle

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What Love Is

Published on by Tosha Michelle39 Comments

Cool Artsy Shoes

Love isn’t
a weekend in Belize.
It’s not flattery.
Rarely, the perfect fit.
It isn’t cake and schnapps
or a walk by the river
with Thoreau

Love is
a photograph cropped,
rearranged, often marred
It’s an arsenal of joy,
of pain, a loaded gun
Locked, fired, reloaded,
fired again.

It’s salty, gritty
rarely sweet, at times solid
at others, a noddle slip
off a chopstick.
It’s a Rorschach test
a complex algorithm
disordered thoughts

Films never get it right.
Songs sometimes do.

Love is
difficult,
a chalkboard lesson,
in Mechanics and
Special Relativity

Love is
a Dixie cup
full of gin
the brush of angel’s wings
horse’s hooves in hell

Love is
true.
Seldom,
but when it is,
it wears sensible shoes.

-Tosha Michelle

Besot with Fire.

Published on by Tosha Michelle131 Comments

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I don’t want a dehydrated love
that lives somewhere between
purgatory and just good enough.

I’d rather bust my knee on the sidewalk,
bruise my arm and cheek on the wall,
crash my bike on a rocky path, crack my
wrist for a love full of oxygen caught fire.

Turning blue to red. Scarlett Crimson.
I don’t want to be rescued from the flames.
I want to be wrapped in them

Let’s lose the word complacent,
and replace it with passion.

Trust that a love full of imperfections
is more interesting than one
full of perfect nothingness.

Let’s get pleasantly disoriented
on a bed of salacious.

Where everything we need
is a finger trail away.

Let’s follow the glint of rosebuds
and not be afraid to step on the
thorns.

Let’s create a love of different rooms
we can waltz into.

Now a lover.
Now a friend.
Now a sexy stranger.

Nothing predictable, no room
for maybes.

I want a love full of poetry,
but nothing conventional

I want crude statements.
Expletives, obscenity.
Possessive pronouns.
Imperative verbs.

A lexicon of love and sex.
A love that’s not offended by
the Fword -foreplay
and likes to fucking fuck.

No! I don’t want a dehydrated love
I want a love that is fully
saturated.

I don’t mind drudgery but lace it
with swoon, with heat.

I believe in the power of endurance and faith,
but let’s pepper it with decadence and sin.

I don’t want us to look back
and realize how sane we were
for each other.

I want to reflect back on
a crazy love that took us and
the moon down.

One that resides somewhere
between soulful conversation and
a wet dream.

-Tosha Michelle

All About Men -A New List 

Published on by Tosha Michelle24 Comments

 My darling friend Randy is a big fan of my silly lists so this is for her and all you men out there. I must confess these are my favorite kind and it’s about time I did a new one.

What Women Wished Men Knew

1. We don’t like mixed signals. Mixed drinks on the other hand

2. Don’t walk ahead of us. Walk with us and hold our hand. 

3. Chocolate and jewelry will get you out of a world of trouble

4. The kitchen counter, up against a wall, on your desk are great places to place knickknacks or if you can think of something better to do with the aforementioned, we’d be totally down for that

5. Sometimes we cry. Deal with it

6. If were having sex with you, odds are we care, so proceed cautiously when it comes to our feelings

7. When we talk, listen. Yes, with your ears and with your heart and mind

8. Sometimes being romantic just means being there and in the moment

9. Don’t be afraid of that universal, wonderful little four letter word… 

Menu 

10. You are unique and special but Beyoncé sums ir up best. Don’t you ever get to thinking

 

Choice

Published on by Tosha Michelle37 Comments

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His shirt is devoid of him.
My dress is much too
pretty to put on.
This day is an easy
choice. Tomorrow,
might not be.

The flames fan to
a jar of splinters
we chopped the
night before. The
fire takes what is
giving freely (without
thought)

I choose to take the
heat in his eyes. I step
out of the shower.
and notices the sexy
message he left
for me on the mirror,
Now the glass is
less full of clean
me.

We make our decisions
We become our choices
We become pleasure
We become pain.

Life with all it’s options.
Roads to choose.
Do we drift or stay
on course? Turn
forward? Turn back?

We make love and tea.
Pillows spill from the bed.
We roll around on the floor
wallowing in soot.
A mop is the only response

Dawn slivers through the
window and across our
bare skin.. The sun winks
at us through a wave of
white. The sky, tall and
blue, curtsies. Taunting
us through the window
pane. The sky and sun
knowing (of course) that
they are an easy choice.

-Tosha Michelle

Thin Mints and Unsent Letters

Published on by Tosha Michelle46 Comments

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Sharing one of my older poems 
Love is often on a street
that only runs one way.
In the space between
stop and go. You think
if you stand still long
enough, he’s bound
to bump into you.

You wait with your
defibrillator.
Doing painful logic
inside your head.
Charting your feelings
in an equation that
never adds up. No
wonder you never got
far in math.

You call out, and he
spits back a thousand
different tragedies.
The shaman in your
right ear says
“WTF, let it go”.
The leprechaun in
your left ear says
“Don’t stop now”.

You climb out of
the pothole you’ve
fallen into, saved by
a rope with a noose
on it.

You’re still alone.
Heart in the gutter.
You pick it up, dust
it off. The wilted
roses blowing
across the road.

You place one foot in
front of the other, only
to find you are on a
moving sidewalk
going nowhere.

You jump off and
hail a cab. In the
distance you hear
a steel guitar, and
what sounds
like a fight song.

You look for clues
and chess pieces
in your purse.
Trying to unriddle
the endnote.

You wind up at a
street carnival,
in a form fitting
black dress, high
heels and garters.

You look up and find
unsent letters in the sky.
Folding the stars into
tokens, you stupidly
hope for another chance
to win that bear.

-Tosha Michelle

The Grudge

Published on by Tosha Michelle49 Comments

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I watered the grudge with a
fervent devotion of a priest
giving communion. I watered
it with the determination of
a drunk on his fourth glass
of gin. The destructive
clockwork of a not so
righteous self.

The cactus in my heart
erupting. I watered it everyday
with a can of venom. My hands
blistering over from the hate.
The fluid and its dark nutrients
taking root, until the petals
bloomed over and clotted my
brain, until there was nothing
left but arid air, laced with
regret, and the silence of
time wasted. The stale
taste of a garden grown
on the wreckage of malice
Gone. The long reign of
bitterness. The tight reign
of hurt feelings. The shards
of anger, shaken from my
eyes. I finally see the sterile
landscape clearly.

How the realization stings.

-Tosha Michelle

You Walked Away

Published on by Tosha Michelle82 Comments

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You walked away. I remember the first time you walked toward me. We sat at what would become our table. You with your beer. Me, with my sweet tea. Two people sharing stories. Connected by our fondness
of music and difficult things

Afterwards, you walked me home. Maybe if I hadn’t invited you in. Maybe if you hadn’t leaned in and kissed me, we might have just stayed friends, but I had to kiss you back. That’s when things really began the undressing, tongue to flesh, a bite to the lobe, hands everywhere. A hasty love, a good idea at the time

That was before promises were broken, before you became a liar. Before I knew I’d never be able to quell
your wanderlust spirit. Before I understood you only find peace in leaving things behind

God, we were stupid. We should have just stayed friends. We sat at our table, you held both my hands at arms length and told me some bullshit how I’m better off with someone else, someone who knows how to stay, how to build. Someone who knows my nurturing is not something to just put up with.

I watched as you got up from our table one last time,
You started to turn toward me but got distracted by
the street noise and the call of distant continents.
You walked away.
I remember the first time you walked toward me.

-Tosha Michelle

Anything

Published on by Tosha Michelle61 Comments

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Please say you are lingerie
I can put on tonight,
the black garters
sexed, sleek, ignitable.

Say you are the red dress
I’ll slip into, the lining made
of paradise or the suede stilettos
cradling my feet, the straps
caressing my shins.

Say you’re my favorite purse
perched on the bed or the bookmark,
lovingly tucked inside
the pages of the latest
Sylvain Reynard
book resting on the nightstand.

Say you’re the sound of
Chet Baker’s voice
“sweet talking the void”
on vinyl, as I dance around
the room.

Say you are the blaze
of the moon, slipping
through the trees
peeking in the open window.

Say you are the air
suffused with the
sweet scent of magnolias
blossoming, petals opening
before they come undone.

Say you are the love revisions
being edited in bold font,
mating consonants
inside my head.

Say you are the backward
heat of my thoughts.
My body’s annunciation.

Say I’m the siren song
that will always call to
you, the music that will
never fade into the hollow
of the years.

Say you are the framed
photograph on the dresser,
the holy spirit of a
yellow tulip, say lace,
say wine, say peach,
say anything.

-Tosha Michelle

She’s

Published on by Tosha Michelle53 Comments

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She ‘s Beatrice and Delilah.
an illusion, a crime

She’s a skyscape that slips
from blue, to grey, to red.

She’s a spider web over
a bank vault.

She’s the pull swirling
in his chest.

She’s a whisper of longing
stuck in his ear.

She’s a wilder life, the sweet
seed, his heart’s core.

She’s a sigh, ragged and
melancholy.

She’s a crushing need
a helix of yearning.

She’s chemistry and anatomy.

She’s the witching hour’s
pleasures of bourbon and sin.

She’s soaked in summer,
spun in contradictions.

She’s a flame grabbing what
it wants, a tumultuous embrace.

She’s a thousand lips bruising
his skin.

She’s a back arching, guttural
moan.

She’s rhythm and release.

She’s as intrusive as a power
outage

She’s as frustrating as a
misstep.

She’s as elusive as spindrift
night.

She’s a woman set in his type,
born in ink, language spilling out.

She’s what he conjugates.
The artistry of his craft

-Tosha Michelle