Year End, 2025
Image AI generated by the Bytesized Studio Year End, 2025 The news scrolls like a broken ticker, headlines flickering through my coffee steam: war, riots, discoveries, a demented felon playing at government. I scroll anyway—habit is a kind of prayer. Social media pulses, a thousand tongues typing over each other, yapping endlessly, echoing into the void that swallows our applause and our shame equally. I write fiction about the first tavern on the Moon— gravity optional, songs mandatory, patrons who float instead of arguing, who spill secrets without consequence. I imagine a drunken jukebox with attitude that plays the echo of Earth songs, all hits sung by ghosts. Then Quadrilles: Forty four words exactly, dancing in ink, footsteps across pages, polite gestures and missteps turned into rhyme and repetition, a waltz for one, then for many, then for the future that won’t listen. Bar poems gather in a stack like unpaid tabs, smoky, honest, sticky with stories you shouldn’t read out loud. ...
