“you should watch for what’s good and say so, watch for what’s bad and say that,
and be afraid of neither observation.
If you lose your temper, lose it; if you find yourself unexpectedly moved, admit it.
Keep your tools, compass and gyroscope,
clean, dry and level.”
Peggy Noonan,
columnist, author
<•>

good
Christmas Eve advice
getting harder to find,
wheat from chaff, and all that,
what’s sensible,
what’s defensible,
and what actually feels
A~ok!
as in
perhaps, it actually could be,
pause to think,
correct?
and:or:heck,
even right

so if you read the above ,
take it from a couple of senior geezers,
you just got a holiday freebie!
yeah, yeah, keep your powder dry,
just ain’t the same, sorry…

we talking tools and fools here,
them that keep you
on a course
of your owned free choice,
with an assist,
to  know your position & to
never to lose your balance

when everybody is
instantly
telling you what to think,
take that long pause,
use your tools,
to pick the problem up,
Rubik’s cube it,
twist and shout,
when the
solution emerges

‘tis the season for
preaching and overreaching,
but use this quietime pause,
look internal,
and keep your instinct and
inside tools oiled,
and mind open, clarified

wish you then, clear eyes, open ears & love;
wisdom, that’s up to you,
but, you’re a billionaire for sure,
use the grey cells you were given
thoughtfully & well,
and keep on looking for
‘what’s a good way,’
which is always an
everlasting work


                             nat lipstadt

~for Marissa Fanelli<

living with a woman who loves her
some vampires,
is difficult for  endless is the sweet sorrow,
of
never having known the thrill of someone biting her neck for a transformative transfusional exchange of body fluids,
makes her sigh periodically as she applies
her makeup

Dutiful man, you do something about it!

I sweep in when damsel is vulnerably unsuspecting, sweeping her blond tress
from her neck, applying combinatory
kisses and nibbles, she shivers delightedly,
b u t
inevitably
indubitably

emits a gasping sigh of great and
delicious length,
signaling she must finish her makeup
applications lest she be forced to begin
all over again
and
her deep regret
that her-nice jewish lover is,

still no zombie




p.s. and when she makes a sign of the cross
using both pointer fingers, to shoo me away
I retort
“Boy oh boy lady, have you got the wrong zombie”

do not address you with frequency
but here, where I am disguised in
a public facing place, it is easy relief
that recent reversals, have occurred,
contusions upon my self, body, mind,
scattered have combined to cause an

erosion of soul

of course this matters little to you, but
nonetheless will inform anyone’s eyes
who happenstance falls upon this page,
and I am gripped by paralysis. life-by-me-
threatened, and I’m ashamed of myself,
but offer no forgiveness nevertheless

what I value has not changed, but my
core is wilting, eroded by the confluence
of circumstances, aging of time, and no
one to ask for guidance, or support genuine,
I’m soft froze exterior, interiors rocky ice

ask you do nothing. but someday - when?circumstance will circle back, perchance
to this literate plea, that asks for nothing,
posting gone unnoticed, on a bulletin board

I reserve the next three lines to unsatisfactorily not explain, just
to inform, erosions of pieces of me, now gone

in these two lines, a fine of fine will have to
be paid, in a currency of cell’s dying quietly

and here, I,
Ogdiddy,
cease, in every way possible