Jerry Chasen's Blog

I often felt that the commercial greetings that I bought were so much less than I wanted to say, so I resolved to create a new birthday greeting of my own each year. It helps that a good friend’s birthday is on January 6!

I knew this would become a series when I started this poem. I’m very lucky to be partnered with Mark, and there’s no way a storebought card would tell him this the way I could myself.

Our country was in the Iraq war, and it wasn’t going well. At the same time, my own life was really pretty terrific, and the dissonance was jarring.