The First for Promise
(1 January 2025)

I
It’s a cold
Gray day
No promise of winter
Say
In the form of
Romantic snow

Not the fearful kind

The same
The foreboding of the same
That for me
Is a bad heart
And
Bad neighbors in
A chilly town

And an existential thinking
About how
To have and read
The next
Passage
Of
Things

And may I ask
What shape and content
Yours
	Toward a sound structure
	With
The broken beams that
	Get majorly
	In the way
	While you are building

And yet
(for
me
for us)
The pressure’s on
As in
The stultified quality
Of things that never change
And yet
Should

In fact
They must

For the things that should not change
But must
How about in
The promise of new
And then
New years

II
Sigh
It sounds like
Resolutions’
Trope
The things we say
We sell things over
And yet
Will
In the popular
Way
Give up
Say
In a month or so
If that

Sigh
What now
What new way to say it

What way to say
We really mean
It
This time

What counts
What reifies

Well
We have this
The versicle way
To say old things to keep
And new
To alter

Songs
Novels
All sorts of declarations
Maybe and
Maybe which is why
We have these
We grew
And grow these
When
Needed

A new way can and
Does change
And so
What shall our new ways be

And so
Answer in
Your own ways and
Our ways together
Please

III
I guess I think
This needs to be
A year
Of change
Or else we’ll have
The same old thing
Dissatisfying everyone
Some
More if not
Forever

C L Couch


Photo by Wilmer Martinez on Unsplash
Times Square, New York, United States
Beautiful city lights looked like something straight out of the movies. The colors were inspired by the Tron: Legacy film.  [What Wilmer has to say.]