• This was originally written in 2023, when the hope was that the end of the pandemic and the start of the recovery had begun – finally.

It’s still pertinent, and I am hoping we have finally turned the corner.

A Prayer for 2025

I am not in the business of crafting actual prayers. I will leave that for the more holy and devout. Yet I intend to craft a statement that functions like an invocation, if I am successful, in that it asks for intervention and help in a troubled life and world. The audience is free to think in terms of whichever cosmic force s/he prefers. See, this is all about inclusiveness.

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, I genuinely pray that our country undertakes a psychic hike to reclaim the spirit of optimism and hope that has characterized the larger part of our history. From Crevecoeur to De Tocqueville and beyond, the American psyche, under the moniker of the American Dream or Way of Life, has been founded upon a powerful trust in the individual as a moral, ethical, self-reliant, and secularly ‘holy’ being.

When wiser and greater minds conceived of a government of the people, and bestowed the power of justice and honor to the collective will of that same people, they did not exclude those who lacked a degree or toiled in a less than academic realm. Yes, they failed to identify women as stakeholders, but the impetus for that remains complex.

I wish for 2025 and beyond that we as a people recalibrate and refocus our stubbornness. In a polarized world, it is futile and fruitless to keep an obstinate adherence to certainty that our principles are pure and righteous, while those of our rival are evil and damning,

I pray in 2025 that we have the wherewithal and the humility to question our own adamant truths. Knowing that groups seeking power always try to divide and conquer, I would confer upon my compatriots, whatever their stripes, the presence of mind to doubt and to suspect all assertions. The heuristic should start with “What if I have been misled by my own people?”

In 2025, I see no way forward if we lack the objectivity to question our own positions with the same ferocity that we distrust the arguments of the other tribe. We shouldn’t be foolish enough to think that our affiliate group has a monopoly on truth, I pray. So it is only fitting to assign Cartesian doubt to even those things I absolutely know to be true. Right?

Wherever you roost or lean, I earnestly pray for courage for the American people. We are all aware at every turn of the reasons the sky is falling this year. It matters not if the shattering of the firmament is caused by climate change, voting rights, drilling permits, medicine shortages, critical race theory, drag shows, or gerrymandering. We should all screw our courage to the sticking place {with apologies to Lady Macbeth} and we shall not fail to maintain our efficacy. Lord knows we have been chronically reminded of the things we should fear. I truly pray that we all stop being so scared.

For the imminent and more distant future, I ask for an infusion of action and follow-through directed to local charitable arms. We all have causes in our daily lives that we know are worthy, whether it’s the more conventional soup kitchen, clothes drive, food pantry, or relief effort.

I don’t cast judgment on your inclination to make a donation to a cause, as that is a worthy and wonderful gesture. But I think the more effectual gift of time, attention, and talent is far more likely to transform both the benefactor and the beneficiary. When they enjoin us to ‘be the change we wish to see,’ they are talking of enduring and sustained commitment to ourselves and our communities. I can make a donation and change almost nothing in my own life, and so investment that affects me is at least as important as the gift.

In 2025, I ask for an infusion of the powers or forces that make people identify their likenesses to one another, and accept and embrace their differences as well. No one will ever accuse me of being especially effusive or empathetic, so I am not making a plea for some lip service to any one cause or aggrieved constituency. Rather, I am wishing that we can take a moment to think.

I hope we can recognize when and where we require that others, especially the less fortunate, should mastermind their rehabilitation by accessing those skills and abilities that we most proudly have developed.

In other words, I pray that we get better at seeing others as they are, warts and all, and then hold them accountable for the self-reliance of which they themselves are capable. We spend too much time, I believe, expecting others to magically “be like us.” If we have been able to pick ourselves up after setbacks or hardships. I wish that we would learn to be proud of ourselves and our triumphs. I also hope we remain humble enough to know that others haven’t willfully refused to employ those same traits. We really are different.

Finally, I will try to encapsulate these thoughts and wishes into a simpler, more easily-understood request for help and intervention of the most spiritual kind.

I pray that all of my fellow citizens give all others the benefit of the doubt. I think we all want what is best for the country, and that we can find ways to achieve collective good without fostering selective harm.

I pray that America reclaim its backbone, and its honor, by facing our fears with resolve and courage. A pervasive sensitivity has rendered all of us worthy of being called “snowflake” in certain moments.

I pray that we may all truly appreciate how much we have, and how fortunate we are in all regards, and that we pledge to share some part of our plenty with those who have not been as fortunate. That sharing should proceed without judgment or condition, except that we pray those beneficiaries will someday be capable of doing the same for others.

Finally, I pray that the people in this world care for others by keeping themselves as powerful, committed, and capable as they possibly can, for as long as they can.

We can choose respect, and demonstrate it, especially in the face of adversity. At many times in our history, adversity and struggle engendered and nurtured our exhibition of greatness.

One of the most
important things, to me,
I’d say. And
look
I’m sure whatever is whatever and it works
but here we are
with me and more things in life I’m learning about myself.
There’s my bedroom, the nursery and the kids’ room
And I never knew until now
the importance of sharing a hallway
but what I’ve found and look
I’m sure whatever is whatever and it works but
it feels like they may all
look the same
though they’re not. They look the same but they’re not. They all appear the same. So
when the villanelle becomes
the vignette and you stand staring down
the hallways and the
smoke bordering it. There’s no
fire.
The villanelle becomes the vignette and the complex becomes a tenth
becomes a sound of a little voice
asking for your hand
and a song
As the villanelle became the vignette became the villain in her sleep
And she needs another voice
in her head, another song to help her dream.

My dear, this dust (was laid among your feet)
Could rarely deemed a framework, period, be.
The oversaturated concrete wept
A foundation of partial tensile failure,
But all good construction, the kind that lasts
Through generations, if we get so far,
At first begins with measured demolition.

The night she told me, first, I saw your eyes.
Bespeckled hazel tones, Morrocan sand
Surrounded by an oasis of hers,
While piercing, mortally, like mostly mine.
She kissed me, fast, your lips were pursed in jest
Of eating sour citrus from my cup,
A year ago, or maybe more or less;

I wish my—I…I wish my penance could
Have been just leaving her, your tiny fingers,
The pain (I felt you almost letting go).
Instead I let it linger through a month,
Before I smelled your hair enough to grasp
At anything that kept your dimpled cheek
From disappearing altogether. Lost

Were any indications I was making
An errant brushstroke, off enough to mask
The lilting of your laugh I heard in hers
When she, and somewhere you, were in my arms
The second day, whose morning I began
The final iteratation of myself,
(But first I’d have to smother my creation).

At least attempt to prove I was deserving,
And cast my empty bottles at his toes.
I felt your lips anoint my forehead, then
She sang me twinkle while I dug my bed.
For years I tried to find the truest pitch,
and kept myself, barefoot, to busk my way
The forty-five it takes to Rotterdam.

The Epping has a stop somewhere in Rhodes; Colossus I am not, though I was saved,
By one who had some overlap of lives
When I was just a boy, and you a fish,
Or maybe more a frog, but I digress,
And simultaneously am vaulting steps…
I suddenly can’t recall how it went.

But you were there, a tangible and tangled
Knot of brain, and not of curly hair,
Though curly is an understatement now,
Before you started, naked (head at least)
Like me, and though I know it’s not the only
Variable that will keep us tied,
I hope reflections have a purposed edge

That you may shed the blights of bananas,
And learn they aren’t the only bruises left
Without the texture issue that persists,
Along with tastes and hates (that don’t exist).
And may you, like the Celtic queen who bore
You, up until we found the hull was breach,
At which point, we ascended to your whim,

Decide your worth is more than trinitite;
You will not need some blast to cut or facet
The mineral, or stone, you will become.
Should tarnish, rust, or Phoenixville alum
Find themselves at threshold out and in,
We’ll ask your mum the applicable laser,
And char them from your orbit, evermore.

If you listen carefully until the silence tugs
At heartstrings,
Or just whispers to the sky in confidence,
With patience, you may hear the sorrow,
Feel exhilaration
As it trickles through the veins of all posterity.

A certain segment of the circus we call
History
Has been assigned the task of keeping track
Of all those things that haven’t easy passage
To the concrete and sequential.

Love, and hurt, and loss, and endless worry.
Heartbreak, death, abandonment, betrayal;
These are life’s immutables,
Though they lend weight and mass to every
Cleansing breath.
No measurement exists to tally up
Collective sum of all the mortal coils.

So all this serves as an apology,
An affirmation for the poet’s craft.
His calling to give voice and record to
The essence of humanity’s parade.

Read any poem and feel the chill of death,
The hollow song of absolute regret.
Or turn the volume up and hear the bass -
Anticipation warming up the blood.
The heat of all the treble and the strings
May overwhelm the brass or tame the drums.

Something divine runs through the length of verse.
So that all poetry is just the same,
As any other while it stays distinct
And offers testimony to but one
While paying homage to the core of all
The family of man and woman too.

Let everyone experience, in awe
The subtle genius punching at these chords
Whose brevity is only overwhelmed
By overwhelming unintelligence.
To wit is fine, to wither, yours, more apt,
As fleeting as it is, its stain persists
And fogs the broken mirrors of my day.

What point did poetry become the medium
Of blighted conciousness with which the dumb
Lead blindness like a bellows to the hearth
With flippant, trash bin, faux-intelligence.
Has mediocrity a gravity?
Something pulls the loathesome to your voice,
And concentrates stupidity by gallon.

You’ve got them by the ears, now loose your chirp!
You’ve got them by the eyes, so add some flash?
You’ve got them coming back and digging in
Like dogs atop a concrete block for bones.
So piss your nothings, scream your blackened tones
In time there will be no more collars here.

You’ve gotten here, a flea, on shoulders less.
Illiterate corpses call your verse “a mess.”