Parchment: A Prayer Quintet

Parchment: A Prayer Quartet is a collection of five poems, each a yearning for spiritual renewal in a troubled age. Inspired by (but not beholden to) the outcasts, beats, and mystics of the American past, it is an urgent, lyric and sometimes-ironic plea for better angels.

To do this now is insanity, I know,

a prayer for a prayer-less century (so far),

but is it crazier than relying

on the knowledge of history?

Is it crazier than denying all progress?

It it crazier than preferring the darkness of the past?