Words are beings with a life of their own.
Each one that comes to me from you,
I catch, dissect, look deep
inside – I play with their hearts.
Sometimes I rearrange them,
wash and give them new clothes.
They become pretty.
That’s how I survive.
Maja S. Todorovic
I’m happy to share with you that my poem ‘Acronym’ has been published on Poetry Corner, under theme “Identity: All of Me”. This is my third poem published outside businessinrhyme.com and it’s starting to be exciting 🙂
8 AM
It’s time for a square outfit
and
Smile No.3
I look further in my agenda:
7 PM
My apron is due,
Pizza Hut perfume.
11 PM
I’m a wild cat
with lipstick, cherry red.
So many roles to play:
Daughter, Mother
Sister, Friend
Colleague, Boss
Student, Teacher
Wife, Lover.
So many acronyms to wear:
Miss, Mrs.
B.Sc., M.Sc
Ph.D.
When it’s time for me?
To wear I?
by Maja S. Todorovic
Maja is an educator and writer, currently living in the sunny Hague. When she is not busy with rhyme, she munches on the bowl of fruit and pretends to do some yoga – or at least that’s how she would like to spend her time.
They say it’s much better to use ceramic knife.
It doesn’t oxidize vegetable meat.
She first rolled the beet over the flat counter – to let
the juices stir. Than cut it in half. She needed only
few drops for a blusher.
On the shelf in front of her, beside his favorite tea cup she found cinnamon.
Just a pinch of this spicy heat will act as a bronzer.
The index-finger on her right hand she gently dipped in the ashtray –
to give it a soft grayish glimmer to her eyelashes.
And the final touch – carmine: dripping souse of red, succulent melted cherries
she mixed with three tears of her own blood she harvested earlier
from her left thumb.
Now, who can resist kissing these pulsating lips?
As she was waiting for him to pick her up, in the last minute she adorned her
right hand with this piece of baked clay – perfectly matching her makeup.
Maja S. Todorovic
For many moon returns I’ve been collecting words. I made a bed. A garden. A bed, planted garden and mounted house, I made of tough love. My heart is even now. It beats in the rhythm of the street clock, only speeds up 6 minutes before noon when it hears the song of trash trucks.
Day sits on my back like a bride’s veil, light but deceiving in this hour of zenith. Nothing stops. You can’t stop. Each worth is measured by a sixteen year old thumbs made of french fries. Exteriors sublimes, narrow walls of sudden disapproval are in front of me. I’m not alone. There’s many of us. Disgruntled, as I rise above superficial daily, biphasic outcomes, executioner appears with an ax, rope, whip in whoop to behead my intentions.
Non-approbation sprouts fear like a weed in the field of your purple smiles; it’s a black sheep in the white flock of your thoughts, unwanted spurt hair in a bushy emotions you would like to pluck. They say you need to face you fear. I don’t have time for that. I can smell it from a long distance, I can sense its millihertz vibrations. I sneak, like stealthy snake I eat it raw, fragile, undeveloped and spit out the shells made of careless, nameless sentences.
I look deep in side of myself: satiated garden groomed, blooms in the color of your eyes.
Maja S. Todorovic
I can touch you.
I can kiss you
or
I can scratch your face.
I can punch you in the stomach
or
I can swing you in my arms
like a little baby.
You won’t feel it.
You are not here.
Numbed, you drift, float.
Just pale flesh sits across me, trapped in a body
without attention, goal, motivation, idea
in temptation to give up.
I can see through you.
I see a desert, deserted of anything human.
Just yellow sand and auburn sky, in vast emptiness
that merge in distance
without horizon, just one dot where time and space collapse.
There are winds, your thoughts, constantly try to
build a new landscape, sand dunes, your new realities.
Still, nothing changes. The form might be different, the essence is the same.
You throw sand into my eyes to blur my vision, yet I manage to see.
I see through you.
I learned from you.
However we try,
we can be surrounded by thousand people and still be lonely.
And it hurts like hell.
Afterwards.. you are just stoned.
Maja S.. Todorovic
She slowly travels towards destined ninth house
where Mercury peacefully waits for Jupiter to arrive
in peregrine flight, exalted in graceful detriment
of opposing stone monolith in the third,
(wanting to return in second)
strong, but humble in the waiting room
of offspring stars breast-fed by the ever-giving moon
Maja S. Todorovic
Yes, I know you, Fear.
I know…how my mother’s body
screamed when she couldn’t get out of bed.
Her eyes would darken,
swallowing my childhood smile.
I know how my older sister hid her head
among pages, pretending to be an astronaut
and I was a suitcase she rolled over the moon.
I know how my father duct-taped his voice,
washing for hours his hands in a bathroom sink
each time he would crush the car.
I know, you are that lump in my throat
too large even for this poem to hold.
Maja S. Todorovic
Your touch is a multiple
sensation of undulating currents,
pulsating limbs:
concave urges initiate every cell
for complementary tangible breath.
In radiance, I crave for more.
Maja S. Todorovic
You remember that boy in the 5th grade that pulled your hair and called you ‘Fatty Betty’?
We know all about it.
You know that ugly bracelet your parents gave you for your 21st birthday and
how you wished it disappear?
Consider it done.
You know that fear of spiders that shows up from nowhere
each time you dust your room?
It’s gone!
Just lift your left arm, it won’t hurt…
This kind man in white coat will take care of everything, dear.
Maja S. Todorovic
It’s in the deepest darkness,
where folded life emerges only with the
raging tempest
or when silence occupies rustling shore.
Untouched they eat flickering moonlight
catch laser sunbeams and jump over foaming waves
yet, don’t recognize our white secretions
we are so proud of, cheap surrogate
of every ounce of coaled milk we suck out
of the earth’s mouth
It’s the new plankton,
It’s the new algae,
It’s the new jellyfish
and the liver transplant in that whale
over there,
they never asked for.
Maja S. Todorovic
Business in Rhyme 