A Fool or a Visionary

Contrasting Poems

Tracks In The Snow

 

One clear morning

In the wilderness

I went outside my cabin

And walked down to the river

In the fresh fallen snow.

There,

On the river bank,

Were two sets of tracks.

Wolf tracks.

They had come to the river together,

To drink I suppose.

The signs said they paused,

To converse,

As wolves must converse.

Then one set of tracks

Went downstream

And the other upstream.

Two lone wolves

Going their solitary ways.

I paused

To think of my life

Before returning

To my empty cabin.

 dec 29, 1995

 

A change of emotion in 2007

 

 

 Magic Wand Rap

Tap Zap!

Play the Magic Wand Rap.

Feel the beat

hard black heat

dont take no flap

from you

from him

from fucking anyone

tap zap

play that rap

magic wand rap

stone shoes sink

other feet stink

my feet in sync

tap zap

magic wand rap

words go away

as magicians play

tap zap

magic wand rap

chant the words

slap them back

magic wand rap

burn the beat

ice the heat

magic wand rap

know that

steel faced chap

hummin the drums

face closed like a trap

plays tap zap

the magic wand rap.

 

pollinate life

Life in order

Live by discipline

Six items to do

do them now.

It is a world anew.

perspective?

overcome obstacles,

like bees spreading pollen,

making honey the basics

no jaunts to the grocery store

to buy the bottled version.

 

Parable of Fry; Cat and the Gnat; and the Lion and the Ogre

 
.

  

                                     the parable of fry

Men of the town of Fry stood on their porches every day and consider their sins. Why they did this is a historic event unknown to most of them. But they reveled in their consideration of their sins and contemplated beginning a religion. So fry in hell or fry in heaven became their saying. a song they sang when they gathered went like this: 

Fry in hell or fry in heaven

a girl and a guy from Fry eloped

with only a frying pan

not knowing as they cooked breakfast

they fried way to heaven.

The verses went on and on.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

So frying pans became a symbol of God and cook books divine.

and high cholesterol, that was a sign that you are with God.

 And those who had heart attacks

were revered as having met with God.

Every morning they would sing their song

fry in hell or fry in heaven and sound of bacon frying was a holy sound.

Then a family of vegetarians moved into the village of Fry

and over the years they outlived and out procreated those that followed the religion of Fry

and so it came down to the day when there was only one old man left

who had grown up with the religion of Fry

it turned out he didn't like bacon and eggs. He would throw them away any chance he had

smoke his marijuana

until they banned all smoking in the town of Fry

and he had to leave and go out into the world at age 86

he went to San Francisco and walked along the ocean listened to the languages of the people from all over the world

he tried to tell him about the religion of Fry how they stood on their back patios and smelled the smoke of bacon and eggs cooking. He tried to tell this to people who spoke Russian and Vietnamese and French none of them understood except the French and they didn't care .

So the old man forgot his name because he was sad because no one wanted to hear his stories or share his religion.

he began to blame his religion based on cholesterol and frying bacon and eggs and he realized

he had to go back home and  become a vegetarian. So he journeyed back to the town of Fry and offered to eat their tofu

he ate it hated it secretly threw it out, when he could ,    but     he was happy with his new friends

they sang their song he sang along with something about tofu in Kurds and ways in lettuce and tomatoes sometimes fish but you have to remember that everyone knew he had lost his mind because he would tell the stories about frying up fish in lots of grease and and eating cows chickens and such stuff. Nobody believed him but they liked him. So ends the story of the religion of Fry and this story.

 The end.

 

The Cat and tne Gnat

A rough and ready cat met a tough gnat

they met floating down the Colorado River

the cat in the boat and the gnat buzzing him

all day long.

One hopes that one is not bothered

by the gnats of the world

but it happens

and although we are not as quick as a cat

we will strike out at the gnat

sneaky gnat

the draws us over the edge

of the already precarious boat

then poof

just like the cat

we are all wet rats

victims of the gnat.

And as we swirl away in the water

the gnat gets the last laugh.

 

The Lion and the Ogre

Once upon a time there was a lair of a lion

and an ogre came to call

the ogre had not even an iota of politeness

he chirped like a rowdy on a sunny day

he offered the lion some aloe

to soothe the lion's soon to be wounds

but the lion haid some aces in the hole

the mosaices

surely you know what mosaics means

 I didn't, the ogre certainly didn't,

but the lion did,

it was a punk rock band 

whose music cleared the land

of anyone who couldn't stand their sound

but certainly ogres 

because if there's anything ogres can't stand

it's a punk rock band. So all ended well for the lion in his lair. well, except for the sound and

Ogres aren't supposed to be the heroes of movies anyway.

 
The end

 

 

Listen For Home by k.s. lewis published

Listen for Home, the third published book of k.s. lewis includes a search for home through full color photography, prose, poetry, stories and a play. The book includes a July 2009 road trip to Webster County Nebraska, the area and people of which Willa Cather wrote and where the author was raised.

fully reviewable at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/listen-for-home/7534255
It takes a bit of time to load due to the number of full color photos.

It can be purchased there by download for 12 dollars or a lot more if ordered (full color photos).

Shifting Sands Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Shifting Sands Part Two:  Is the world made of words?

            I wondered today if the world was made of words but I couldn’t see that image.   I thought of titling this chapter, “The World Is Made Of Words,” but realized that it is not.  Words are used to create drawings in the mind.  Good writers create vivid drawings in the mind.  Our minds are slate boards for artists to draw with words.  Quickly arranged, quickly erased, word created images by the source code of brilliant writers.  I have begun reading again.  Gandhi autobiography.  Kundera’s, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird.   I want to reread Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.

            Now everything seems to be italicized as I dictate with Dragon Speak.  Perhaps that is for a reason.  I just decided to rewrite Knights of the Nebraska Roundtable, my unpublished novel from my youth,  interlineating the youthful writing with writing from the present. A distraction arises.  The word, “Anixter” came up on my screen and I looked it up and it had no meaning except a global company for whom I could not get information without paying using a credit card.  I shall use it to represent global companies whose face is shrouded by the Wall Street Journal.

            I realize that I must read in order to write.  I’m writing source code for the human computer to turn into images in the mind.  I need to learn how to write that source code to trigger the human computer into creating images in the mind.  Perhaps the world is made of words, source code is language and perhaps this is an intricately programmed computer creating new artificial intelligence and I’m just part of it, just realizing that I am part of it.  Sometime ago earlier this year I rewrote the beginning of the book, unpublished book, Knights of the Nebraska Round Table. I kept the poem at the beginning, perhaps one of the very first poems I wrote that I still like.  This was the beginning of Shifting Sands.  Perhaps I will put this out there in the world and see what the reaction is to the writing.  Just curious.

 

The Journeys and Adventures of a Knight of the Nebraska Round Table

 

We gathered one evening under the stars,

Knights preparing for a quest,

Innocently, we drank a toast to the future,

And thus began our journeys

To the ends of the earth

-Sue Stellar

 

 

Once upon a time long time ago there was a boy who traveled south from the snow and cold of the land of Nebraska to a place called Las Cruces, New Mexico where snow was unheard of and the warmth of the Sun and the sands of the desert replaced the cold and snow.

Eventually he traveled back North again, but he was not the same person that left the farm to travel south.   He had seen people and land and mountains that had charmed him and awed him and had made him love the Southwest and the road.  He traveled back stopping along the way, making his way to the small towns of the Midwest wondering if he would be trapped there forever, never to travel again, like his parents uncles and cousins and neighbors.  He vowed not to let that happen.  Little did he know that there are many ways to get trapped in life, like an endless computer loop, but he did not know much of life, or, for that matter, computers, because this was long before the 21^st century.

On his way he visited the mother of a former girlfriend in Albuquerque who drank wine with him and spoke with him in the cool of an adobe house near the river, the Rio Grande River, on a back dirt road in the middle of the city.  He still remembers those times they drank wine by the fireplace in Albuquerque.  The boy who could throw the baseball very hard but who had not burned out his fire of competition in college went home to the farmlands of Nebraska to play baseball for a summer only to leave again and this time he moved his home to the mountains of Colorado.  He took with him a dream of what he had left.  He took with him his imagination which made the farmlands magical.  His imagination saw deeper into where he had been when he could see with his eyes while he was there.  So he went to Colorado and went to law school in Denver.  But his imagination imbued him with a magical memory of that summer of baseball, adventure and love in which he had become a Knight of the Nebraska Roundtable.

He thought of the people he left often because he did not take any friends with him.  No friends from Las Cruces, no friends from Nebraska, no lovers went with him, all that he had were his memories and his imagination.

Sentences he wrote on pages,  paragraphs of law he wrote in law school, yet he dreamed of writing a book about the characters he knew in Nebraska and so he did, but he didn’t know what that much later he would learn about rhythms of words, metaphors, similes and analogies.  But most of all he learned about life and the summer of baseball spun into context like a looping slow curve cutting the outside corner of the plate.

 

          January 9, 2009

“Life is different from different perspectives.”  We count on that statement as truth.   Age, wealth, health, experience, education,  location, even time of day changes perspective.  Turning a baseball in one’s hand shows differences in the seemingly symmetrically stitched object.  As a baseball pitcher I know.  A ball with some thick stitches makes for great movement on a pitch.

Tonight six of my plays will be performed at the Mercury Café.  I am one of the actors.   Ten years ago I was living in an “ostentatious” downtown loft, writing The Blue Vagabond and dating a girl in whose basement I now live.   Before I wrote about a homeless person, now I am almost homeless.

So I am writing these words, this view of the world, from the perspective of a basement, from the perspective of not having paid my rent in one month or is it two?  I almost titled this journal, “Embracing Change.”  We shall see.  This is a book about change and perspective.  It may not end up being a journal.  I still intend to write my “Unadorned Journal” but that could change.  Lol.

Contrasts and change and how that is viewed by others are topics I wish to examine in the crucible of my life day to day, from the past and in the future.  Here is where I find the courage to “jump off the cliff” and fly.