Author: Maja Todorovic

is an educator and writer. After finishing her PhD in Organizational Sciences and years of academic work, she switched her scientific pen for more creative expressions. With 3 books and 2 dissertations published, now she helps people find their writing voice and experience creativity through the power of words.Business in Rhyme is her creative corner where she blogs and teaches about beautiful uses of poetry and poetic techniques for improving writing, personal growth and creativity.

Revenge

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, My personal rhyme - from time to time

You can’t see my eyes. You can’t hear my mouth.

I’m just a flat object, a pile of disoriented flesh, swimming, jumping, swirling, curling on the edges, in ribbons before satisfactory landing on your tongue.

The teeth. There is not much for the teeth.

In darkness of your breath, I slide gently but abruptly in the inner side of your neck,

Softly, eagerly dancing in the fire, until the acidic ash hits just the right spot of your brain.

Your heart pounds in rhythms of undecided rain drops, sounds of childhood and winter Sunday nights.

I melt with vigor you’ve never met before.

Sometimes you like to put me in the broth of your mind,

To troth with lust disguised as a longevity tip.

You suck my marrow as you swiftly dust the grease from your fingers.

You pour me in bottles so you can relinquish your bottomless thirst,

a sustenance for you, only you, as

take, take, take

only take bursts from your infertile chest.

The most innocent cloud, the most invisible feather, to bath your insecurity,

Your excuse to execute another moral sin, how much you’ve been keen

To mould me, fold me in isotropic modes of yeast, always ready for you to feast.

Yet I am patient. I can wait for days, ..no, no days.

Months, years or decades to show you my true face.

I sneak quietly, to the chambers of your never-dreaming dream

you don’t know I’m still there. I am a diligent builder, brick by brick, vein by vein, I subdue, construct, bifurcate rivers, over the brim with crimson pools in your head.

Sometimes I sit across the table of your liver. You seem bitter with the hand delt. The amniotic charge has its own charm.


rebellion so sweet and seldomly stopped

It’s so easy for me to grow into you. I’ve never played the victim role.

I am big like a thunderstorm dispatched hot balloon.

And your cheeks are sunken like a sad masquerade threat.

Autophagy is a distant memory of a cannibalistic bribery.

No, revenge is never best served cold.

Your eroded heart, lost in the exhale of super nova lament.

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Harvest

by Maja Todorovic, posted in My personal rhyme - from time to time

It makes you feel eery. You place the foot on a pillowy ground, while soft blades tickle you, a baby fingers against your wooden skin. Transparency is a lie, your sinews swell in just saying the word.

Teary drops of sweat envelope the crest of your stubborn forehead. A blood, changing colors like a traffic light on a busy Trafalgar square, you dare to empty your mouth. Folded beneath, some words are stuck, finely tucked reaching your elbows as you lean against my chest. The quest to You has just began.

Deboning is my favourite part. Enriching your voice with screams, too satiated to subside, too large among the crowd to hide. I collect all tiny tissues in a handkerchief for later.

It made me sadder seeing you float in the mercy of my fingers. A syringe is small, a knife undoubtfully friendly. My tools never disappoint.

You are hard to fool. A trout cradling in a river grass, peddling the pebbles, you grasp for air. The crater of your naval eruption is a Holiday in Rome. Ecstatic, euphoric, dismantled reality on the tips of your brown-eyed cheeks lose the potency.

I put my trembling hand bellow the wings, imprisoned in the rib-cage of your life. Slowly and gently I dispatch You in a jar so I can admire my prey from a far.  

People come and stare at a windowsill, wondering if it’s fake, but that doesn’t lessen my despise. I smile.

Now I finally have a heart to break.

Out of this World

by Maja Todorovic, posted in My personal rhyme - from time to time

Time is slipping through my fingers, dripping like stained rain drops in the sewage of Life.

Collected fragments of liveliness forever lost and buried under the noise of hope for better tomorrow. An illusion, yet I am a very bad magician, every trick wasted and foreseen by the ironic smile of child yet to be fooled.

Cradled in my numbness I believed and trusted the System. One that I was perfectly designed for. I could mould myself, bend, stretch, or crawl the way it was needed. In return I was fed just the right amount of lies and disbelief so carefully tailored for innocent deceivers.

My umbilical cord is strong, with heavy inertia, like an octopus with long tentacles dragging into my awareness all that I needed to be in soft and warm. Some call it comfort. But the ease became sharp glass protruding my reality, making me bleed in words, and sentences I so desperately wanted to keep.

Mouth to mouth, you gave me the sense of oxygen yet my lungs evaporated the moment I was teared off. I was a lonesome astronaut who abandoned the ship, now floating in the space without direction or meaning.

Time became stories in which I tried to envelope myself. But this cover, a woollen blanket full of holes of moth bites, made me freeze in side.

Even more.

Even deeper.

Even stronger.

Disintegration. Annihilation. Such fancy words. But I don’t care for syllables. I don’t care for vows still trapped in my throat. Doesn’t make me stop.

To search.

To question.

To try.

For the tiniest. A milli, micro, nano. Second of possibility it isn’t over. It isn’t late.

The Spring may come. And with it a golden ray of opportunity to melt what is left.

Teeth graveyard

by Maja Todorovic, posted in My personal rhyme - from time to time

I’m folded

In sentences I’ve never reached

My tongue never expressed

By the bleached letters of the un(know-ing)ly names

In a drift of a second just to be lost

In a pure desire to please you.

Who are you?

But you want me to ask hoW are you…

Yet I AM tired of playing anagrams,

Of playing small

Or just being u pure seduction for a teeth graveyard

You are so proud of.

It does feel like a disappearance, a discrepancy

Of non-left consonant.

In the majestic of your mighty power,

That you are right and I AM  wrong(ly) accused

Of being never enough.

It’s like a thread, a stich that goes under your skin

Where two bones meet in a collision of being too much

Yet, in times I want to cut it, cut it (gently, like a sweet fudge),

cut it off my heart and to be free.

Why is it duffiCULT to stay out of it, so I can BE inside myself.

Without social proof, faked anxiety and fainted misery.

The dissonance is brave step and tears you apart like a love

At first sight, a sweet taste with bitter epilogue.

Experience fogs my direction, stopping me in my tracks

To see you fully in your victimhood.

With partial sisterhood, lost(ly) praised motherhood

In a not so close neighboured

Of your weakened eyes, with fingers too small

To cover your ears.

You lose your power in a precious attempt,

Fallen grip, immaculate strip, despite my flaws,

Despite family laws of endurance.

Here I AM, walking boldly over the Sun,

A fairy tooth,  evaporating in existence of

Laid off mimicry in nature’s cycles.

Here I AM, digging through the ocean

Of impossible resurrection,

Breathing through your trimming words,

Up-side down steaming perfection.

Here I Am, flying above you,

A Super Nova yet to be born,

A thorn in the rose, daring to pass by you,

As you folliculate, satiate on redeemed

Parts of your self-esteem,

With white grin

Adorning your face in a space,

Will never meet again.

Elevator pitch

by Maja Todorovic, posted in My personal rhyme - from time to time

Darkness. I remember the darkness. Soft, warm, and extremely volatile. Fragile. With the smell of freshly washed underwear. Naked. Without feelings. Just holding curiosity with my small clenched fingers.

Break. I don’t put together. I break. Not to pieces. Not to particles. To invisible and back. To deflated Super Nova. I am wrenched. I am dishonest. Dissociative in the warm darkness. Now with the smell of freshly picked roses. I am invited. I am called out.

Even though I never wanted to begin.

I am pulled. But I am not scared. My scream protects me. Brings me joy. Brings me ecstasy.

I walk barefoot. But I feel tingling under my tongue. Tongue is curled, bent, stretched as it hatches a like hen’s egg into words I finally roll out. In bravery. In mastery. Of the incoming daylight.

I still walk, as coldness envelopes me. There is a sudden nudge. I stand still now. Like a proud trunk of the tree in the cold winter wind. I stand and withhold. I stand, but darkness moves upwards, in the delight of echoing noise coming from beneath. Buttons are lit on my left side. But only number 5 works. I press it gently.

The door opens to a garden by the river. There is a flock of magpies lying around. Mating. My father takes me by the hand to search for dandelions. Their yellow, perching, capricious heads open and close, fast as the minute goes by. I smile.

I blink and coldness envelops me. The nudge is even stronger this time. I crouch to remain still and by accident, I press button 17.

The rhythm of drums seduces me. I move in a trance as wet bodies, reckless limbs, and disjointed intentions rub against my pale and bruised skin. The kisses fly around me. Some I catch and wear instead of lipstick. Some I imprison and they wiggle in my mouth like a drunken moth fantasizing of a broken bulb. Some I lose in the distant gaze of dim lights and beer stains.

As I breathe I am in newly found darkness. I need rest. I need to put my beating heart in retard fast. I lean on a cold wall, but suddenly there is a hand against my neck. To my surprise is gentle, slick, and tracks my arrow bones so tightly. As it founds the way to my pants, parts me with all my will and his experienced skill.

As I moan in fervor, the nudge double in amount. 34. The strange new land in front of me. The network of water, out of this place tulips pauses, smelling of early autumn and forgotten spring. Rain pouring flinched in pondering little lakes. I jump over. But I never get it there. The jump. The step. The walk. The run. The fly. The wings. The pace. The padding. It’s so saddening. Never enough.

I crave coldness. Under my nails. Above my eyebrows. In between flickering lights on my left side. I crave going down. The stairs. At my own pace. Without wings and safety nets. I crave zero. Below zero of Russian taigas and Norwegian tundra’s. I crave below the earth, where there is only 1 sun to admire. One basement to wish for.

The Wind is still Strong

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, My personal rhyme - from time to time

The container of time lost by the wind. It escapes the boundary, as I float towards my culmination. Twists and turns in red lights, no floors in between, bends at her own knees, lovingly seeing true colors of the day. The morning has the smell of fear, the one that sticks to your nostrils, and as much you try to exhale it, it plaques stronger to your bones.

The say resilience is the savior, many moons looked after. And I miss, like a Halley’s Comet I miss, once, again, just like 40 years go, to be fully me. To accept myself. To value myself. To honor myself. Fear is ever-present, it’s my new air. I don’t know of anything else.

I try to remember in my own container of space how can I collect myself and knot the peace out of pieces of my broken soul. My head was bowed for too many suns and my back only recognizes heaviness and disappointment.

I often write of happiness, of that meeting, collided opportunities, where your true self shines, as you embrace your shadow. But nobody tells you how to tumble in the dark in the meantime. How to find a meaning in rhythms, as you try to fathom repetitive cycles of lessons you refused to learn – or your teachers were simply lousy?

I laugh at myself often, as the wind kicks me in the chest, still I swallow my fear, cannot spit it out fast enough. In the remnants of what I would like to be my old self, I find trails of never-forgotten childhood stories and anecdotes, so finely wrapped in the middle age tears and regret.

I lost my gravitational tides, I recognize only one e-motion, as my moon has dissipated far away. I don’t know how to rise again. As everyone around is so neatly pulled together, I break, once again, I break and there is no end.

I am a bat, carved in my cave, there are no senses except for my heart that beats so loud and relentlessly in hope it will frighten my fear. Will it ever run away?

The wind is still strong. Maybe if I hold on tightly for just a second will I become more resilient. More real. More me.

A Day without Me

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, My personal rhyme - from time to time

It was just a day, an ordinary day. I was dressing up, putting on my black winter jacket, when all of sudden I was surrounded by darkness. A throbbing pain came down my neck and I was lost. Gone. But a Day without Me was born. I was eleven when I first heard that song. I remember how much I loved it. It had everything. That emotion. That power. But I never knew that one day, a Day without Me, might turn into Life without Me.

I still don’t know where it is. It’s not that dark but, my left eyesight is damaged. Still. But it’s not still. It has thousdounds of little, white flickering lights that my brain by mistake flashes up in an attempt to understand something. The bright lights are here, in a Day without Me.

Sometimes I swim. Towards lights. Trying to find my anchor, as a tempest storm rages in my head, my ears, my chest, my lungs, my womb. Rages and I spin. I try to swim. My core is still strong. I do every second morning 200 abb pushups. In between Days without Me. And my spirit sings. And says walk. You are a spirit walker. Or swim if you like. And I tell “But I am a spirit daughter. And a walker. In Life without Me, I can be anyone I want!” And he withdraws in confusion.

Darkness over my head I can conquer. I am safe for another 29 years. In the meantime, how can I create A Day with Me? And maybe then, a Life with Me!

The fireworks this very moment interrupted me. Again. My heart pounds. Spirit hides behind my ribcage. Crouch. Doesn’t walk. Doesn’t swim. It swings in the cradle behind the bone-bars, waiting to be born, one Day without Me.

Research at University of Wales: Poets living with a sky – follow up review

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Write, create, innovate!

This research started several months ago, and I use this opportunity to once more express my gratitude to all poets who kindly took their time to participate and answer the questionnaire. Unfortunately, the number of participants wasn’t sufficient for deriving credible results so at the end we needed to go with different focus group. I was really looking forward to examining results, but as it comes with any research in social setting, the outcome can go either way.

I hope you enjoyed these beautiful poems, inspired by sky and that they gave you additional ideas for your own writing.

Maja