Year End, 2025

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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.

They laugh at me.

I laugh back.

Let’s print them.

Twenty years married,

which feels like a decent kind of magic,

or at least a strong hinge.

We toasted quietly,

hands warming hands,

thinking of all the toasts we didn’t finish.

The minor heart issue is a nagging friend,

whispering about mortality

as if I hadn’t noticed

between drafts and dishes and debts.

Family fades like last call:

uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents,

their absence is a warm wind

through empty chairs.

I am the last one left

counting their echoes in the wood grain

and in the ribs of the bar.

I raise a glass anyway.

I write anyway.

I post anyway.

I love anyway.

Because even loss has a rhythm

and memory is a jukebox

that spins whatever song you’re ready to hear.

2025 ends

with a pen in my hand,

a mug on the desk,

and the quiet audacity

of still being here,

still floating,

still hoping

someone will come tell stories with me.

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Shared as an end of year wrap up for the DVerse Poets Pub. They kept me writing through the year, so thanks for that.

©2025 Christopher Reilley 

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