It’s Harvard VS Yale this weekend, the vibes are just starting now. Everyone - and I mean everyone - has been asking about my game tickets, because guest tickets are $25 a pop. I’m more interested in the parties than the game, so I donated mine (Students get 1 free ticket and they can buy 2 for $15 each) to Lisa (one of my suitemates) for her family.

Lisa, Leong, Anna and I are getting ready to go down to the dining hall. Lisa asks the room, “Harry Styles’ new buzzcut - Yes, or No?”
“No,” Leong said, not looking up from her teen fashion magazine.
“Oh, no - God no,” I answered, “The worst decision of 2023.”
Anna blows a raspberry, “I think he’s trying to ditch his ‘pretty boy’ image and go hard rock.”
Lisa followed up, “And?..” “And NO, disaster NO, jump the shark NO,” Anna answered.
“I’m a NO also” Lisa admitted, and she’s a h-core Styles fan.

Later, Lisa was reclining on my bed, using every pillow I own to turn it into a chaise lounge that wouldn’t wrinkle her outfit. Her heels were on the floor and her bare feet were dangling in the air. Her toenails were a French tipped twinkly-pink.

She was slurping on a Coke-Zero - again - for a much-needed kick of caffeine before the night's events - which made me feel guilty, because she picked that up when I took her to Paris last summer. I’ve told her (a million times) how bad it is for her metabolism and endocrine system.
“How could you do this to me?” I asked, as if exasperated - which is currently our in-joke for everything.
“Now-now-now now-now,” she says, in self-defense, “what SHOULD I be drinking then?”
“H2-oh,” I say. “H20, as in water,” she sort of inquired, she then asked, “What’s the ‘2’ stand for?”
“Twenty,” I think, snarking back.
“Oh, you fancy, huh?” she laughed.
“I’m in college.” I shruggingly bragged.

I was shuffling through my closet, trying to pick out an outfit that would, at least, look ‘ok’ next to Lisa’s ‘in your face’ fun mix of pinks and purples sprinkled with neon greens.
Barbie herself could never.
I doubted I could keep with the theme.

My secret to dressing for these endless ‘theme’ parties, is to just tune out the noise and focus on your feels. If you give too much weight to how others will judge you, it’ll ruin the moment. I ended up wearing a vintage, deep blue, Betsey Johnson dress with matching tights and black ballet flats. Glittery, smokey-eye makeup and messy curls completed the 'très bien ensemble'.

I looked in the mirror, hoping for glam, and shrugged, “the scene’s going to be moody-lit anyway,” I said, as an excuse to the universe.

“You’re going to ******-der-der,” Lisa pronounced, as we gathered our bags to leave. “******-der-der?” I chuckled.
“******-der-der,” she confirmed, as if it were obvious.

h-core = *******

Golden leaves are bright
I love the hue of the sky
Fall brings me so much joy
Even I enjoy autumn nights

My favorite movie's playing
My dog is by my feet
I'm surrounded in a popcorn blanket
and can laugh genuinely

Sometimes I wish I could share this
But for the first time in a while
I feel happy alone with my dog
Drinking hot chocolate with the window open

Spoilt from birth,
Pampered and needy,
Being the spare an inherited curse,
Leading to actions often quite seedy.

Great aunt Margaret blazing the trail
Questionable choices aplenty,
Drugs and alcohol steering her sail
A life of regrets, vacuous and empty.

Followed by Andrew possessing of valor
But aimless and vain in every respect,
His choices a mess, cause of great clamor,
So by way of example what to expect?

As to his mother, that heart-shearing tale,
The lovely Diana Princess of Tears,
A tragic figure determined yet frail,
The ultimate victim to her own inner fears.

But a glass half empty is a mindset of sorts,
Blindly ungrateful to privileges bestowed,
Clouding his mind with nothing but torts,
Leading the spiral down a winding dark road.

We the onlookers can only but hope
That time and experience will yet prove the key,
Shielding his fall from that slippery *****,
Grasping the change which for now he can't see.

I was no Harry Potter
Didn't have that much goodness in me
But maybe I was a Draco Malfoy
Trying to figure which road to take
Light or dark?
But somewhere along the journey
I scattered 8 pieces of my soul
like Voldemort

Magi always bring Magic, among other
things, Frankincense was given me to give,
some kids bring tobacco.

Sunday, in our world with weeks
and months and years, in constant tension
pulling days from our lives, as gone-by,
but barely acting once in decades
of note, until
daily news of those who did
begins to pile up and tends to overflow
into to story, myth, and history, fit
with screwy prosody
and no practical scheme for rhyme…

all proving, now is after all that,
our access to mind wandering excursing,
excusing your innocence and ignoring
your being not so,
not so innocent, nor
feeble of mind, un exercised in godliness.

Yes, this
is the blessed assurance that we
were not the first to be
Perfectly Normal, Thank you.

------- and, further more

mind wandering is not a wartime pleasure.

Forward Tactical Operations Center,
some where
actual place, a point in time and space,
to you from me,
actively, choosing to rise to the occasion,
and bow to the overall situation,

life is attractive, not repulsive,
knowing is appealing to the best in me,
not the lazy
good for nothing I can be, with no help
from you or any
strange
power not mine to use,

con-sci, come see, came saw, and a we
arose to agree, this might
e
see, esse, e, this might be power, lying idle.

--- balance of power? Ha. Push
comes to shove, and wishes we could
make up a reason
to enjoy today as the final sure thing.

-- it was a darkthonic thought ought shall should

Substrates, strata below, this pliant surface,
gurgle, signaling nothing, save, more or less,
a belch, or a ****, more like,
ew, {cell phone- in a search pattern}
we need not more of that,
what stink think ye we ought celebrate,

buffoon?

Suppose we all know the story behind
or under as we may,
surmise, compromising prized right ness
given up over down,
stand up, fall down, prop up hold down

proper propping
propagate a reason, fit to this season
- autumn, ends the year, winter
- starts next
now
all this de novo knowing, for the price of attention
you may know, not freely,
known, but freely taken as known before, by others
of our kind,

-- I am distracted by a blue jay, on the rock
-- behind the thinker comes
the thought, dragging it's feet, to make clouds of dust,
because,
the dust is there, and does this flying at my desire
to see once, and again, the effect of

me at six, mind wandering on a dry and dusty trail,
-- realizing
confabulatory stories are in fact
"perfectly normal, thank you. A basket of eggs, or a basket
of

air, empty air, no signal, no closing inverted commas.

Have we lost the magic?

---
No listen, ah, and smell,
the bacon, ah, forbidden meat,
smells so good, does it not, smell so good?

It might not **** you, son, but hell of a price
you pay for taking a bite, of some thing
due to it smelling,
so good.

--------- setting, as the propagated
translation of tradition to kab-allah, I say
a wish in time to pre
vent any explosive out burst of gut dispute,

per and may haps rise around me, big
am, we, m'fam… wakes in me a joy,
quite normal,
joy of a grandfather, finishing the faith
a character has developed,
while making, wei true, making wei wu
wu wu of the ever skeptical sepsis sort,
test this
T-cell, is this us? Or is this MERSACOVIDEO
override, through the bluetooth meanies

missing since the Yellow Submarine sunk
in Central Park, c. 1968.

Around the time Dubcek lost to the Commies.
Same season when North Korea got the Pueblo.

The tangled web,
seen in the sunlight topping the eastern wall,
George Harrison, perfect timing
every time I remember, this is real, out there
nearer the edge of my light cone,
from c.1968…

deception, ungrip the gripped fist,
monkey reaching for the fly in the bottle,
that chatters incessantly of having lived before,
monkey fist
feels something sticky,
is it… curious as george, for dammedshore,
a wave
of recognition, there's Waldo,
and Magic, Incorporated, free to reread, and
seed into my grand children,
who are reading the same hard back
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, that
I brought home to their mother after the trip
to Huston, during HP's takeover of Compac,

No, correction, it was after the trip to Denver.
--- sidetrack breadcrumb Quark and metadata

It's a destiny on
everyday to
the sunbeams
to hit the soil
and the green
to grow fresh

It's a nature, every
seeded plant to start
growing with
germinated awakening

This, is not by guess
it's just on real incidents
That had so many did
in the dreaming of the
realities yesterday and
the day before yesterday