A Fool or a Visionary

the search for stability

Stability

Everyone searches for stability,

but stability on a ball that circles the sun

and constantly rotates

at a speed

not worth looking up because I know

it is faster than I can run.

So you see our ability to maintain stability

is doomed from the beginning.

Instead stability is defined in relativity

to instability of fellow man.

Problem is to be stable

you really have to run faster than you are able

and the faster you run

the more people say you are unstable

but you can't grab a breath

to tell the truth because you have to keep running

stability in the universe so large

that you don't even show up

as a dot on the map.

Stability, a long sought grail in this day of breakneck change

cars driven by computers

brains controlled by chips.

stability!

disease by roll of the dice

you don't have cancer you probably get Parkinson's

if you don't have the flu, yea

we can all go to the zoo

digital information inundates the world

we swim in it

it is our Ocean

it is our scam

it is our woman

it is our man

stability is our ability to run

while you're still young

until the world laps you twice

and you come undone

yes, you come undon

and sit on the side,

no longer on the ride

watching the world spin

and the people running to keep up.

stable in your instability

at last.

A MESSAGE TO THE AUDIENCE

 
 A MESSAGE  TO THE AUDIENCE

By k.s. lewis

First read at Crossroads Theater at Slam Nuba event May 30, 2011

 

I have a secret

I am not supposed to tell

 I promised myself I would not

So maybe I won’t

But maybe I will

It is 6 PM and tonight is poetry at the crossroads theater

 Slam nuba

 But that’s no secret

The secret is about living

 And it works for  writing poetry too

 

Never thought I’d keep a secret

That was so important to everyone

 

But then again no one listens for real

 So I could tell you the secret

 Tomorrow you would  not remember

You know all about life I expect

 

  But do you know your best friends favorite poem?

  Does your best friend even have a favorite poem?

  Are you in love?

 Do you know what love means?

  I don’t have the answers but maybe I do

 I think his favorite poem is......but wait

  do I know my best friend is?

 Is it him or her  or mom or I don’t know?

 So you asking me to know  favorite poems

 Of each one of those people?

 What does your best friend say when she goes to sleep?

  Ask yourself what you say.

 So  I haven’t told you the secret

   It is not a particular religion

 Or even a movie although I love movies

  Why is it that I have to keep the secret?

 Not tell you exactly what it is.

 Maybe I Would be embarrassed at how shallow

 My thinking in your eyes?

 I took old notebooks and looked at them

wondered  did I know the secret then?

 Suddenly I start wondering if there’s more than one secret?

 I question myself.

  Is my secret one of the laws of the land?

 Now at 6:22 PM I have run out of time.

 To figure out exactly what  I want to say

 Then i think back to what I just said and I realize

That I demonstrated my secret without telling  you!

I did not tell you my favorite movie

Or what I  say at night

Before I go to bed

I did not tell you if I know what love is

 I  Hope you ask

 What secret was he talking about?

  And when you ask the question

 You will have given yourself the  answer

 told to us by a  a Greek philosopher

 many many years ago:

 you all know  the secret I’m sure

 but in case you don’t know he said

 “the unexamined life is not worth living”

 and as a poet

I interpret that to mean  in simple terms:

 Question your life and write, write, write!

Now a question for myself

 Am I brave enough to read this to you

  when no  one else has seen the words?

 Because I only told you half of my secret

 The second half is to challenge yourself

 To take the risk and tell your secrets

 So question your life

then                                                                                                                                

Take take the risk and  tell your friends

your children and even your enemies

what you found in poetry, prose or music.

That makes life worth living.

 Now that I’ve told you my little secrets

  I am like the cornhusk  abandoned in the field

   Returning to the soil from whence I came

 Tomorrow I hope you remember  to plant the seeds I offer

 In a place that they grow tall.

"Question your life and write, write, write!"

 

 

 

WHEREVER THE WAVES WASH ME

Each night

He rowed  his dory

 And flirted with the ocean.

 Steel locks  rasped on wooden oars,

Paddles slapped on water,

 As the gloom of night arrived

and took away his sight.

Yet he rowed til midnight

On the back

Of his ever restless lover

Then stashed his oars

And delighted in riding  the waves

To a destination unknown.

 

 

White roses

White roses

December 25, 2010. Bruce visited me and we wrote poetry. Lisa called me and so did Sarah. Other than that I have been alone and it has been quiet. I sent e-mail to my sister. But now for the writing. This is an entry done on July 25, 2010. When Bruce and I went to Santa Fe there was a full moon at the solstice so I read him this piece.

I was grouchy. Lisa insisted that I see the full Moon rising. In the moment I sat in a white plastic chair watching a full moon illuminate metal sculptures in the backyard of the house in which I live, a man was murdered with a candelabra at a table in a restaurant where I had eaten years ago in Paris. In New York a former vagabond caught a cab and said a prayer to God thanking him for rescuing the vagabond. That same moment a diver in Bonaire, making a night dive directs his light beam onto an exotic shrimp with a six-inch antenna searching for a connection. In London, four women wearing black, kiss and hug before they part and just a few steps away my roommate makes me a strong drink designed to cleanse me of all angst. And the strange glow of the moon rays illuminating the backyard reveal the ghosts as well as the flowers. I tried to absorb all the energy from places afar that ride the beams of a full moon in July.

As I thought of those places I had been on other nights of the full moon, one memory vanquished all and once again I sat in the courtyard of the museum on Christmas Eve in Mexico City, full moon illuminating players in a play spoken in Spanish. The beauty of the night draws the times together so that if I close my eyes and see the past it is as if I'm awake and eyes open. I see images riding moon beams to the backyard where i sit. Magic moon beams bridging years and miles.

Poetry written Santa Fe from December 21 through December 23, 2010.

We are sitting at the bookstore and coffee shop named Collected Works in Santa Fe New Mexico.

I recall now that I wrote a poem on the computer on the way down that I will put in this group.

The first ones I wrote on 21 December 2010.

Solstice.
Return to New Mexico.
Santa Fe.
Tonight the
moon will appear,
from a canyon on the edge of the city,
solstice December 21, 2010,
we wait.
We live.
We breathe.
In the Valley of the witches.
Tepostlan Mexico
the witches gather,
waiting to perform the rites,
while we wait to perform ours in Santa Fe
each waiting for the emergence of the silent watcher,
our measure for living.
So the seasons change.


The topic for poem number two was pinto beans.

From now on, as it was before, I will have a cauldron, of pinto beans simmering, for each visitor in my home, whole, mashed, refried they remind me of the day, I stepped off the bus, into the early morning Rocky Mountain beauty of air & Sun, Questa, New Mexico 1974, for breakfast that morning no surprise, refried mashed pinto beans!

This is not all we wrote but the swirl came and stopped me so this is where I shall stop. And I shall take the words given to me by dragon speak and write one more. For myself. The city lights seen from the 15th floor beckon me on.

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. 

 

           

 

A Girl Named Amanda by k.s. lewis (his first children's story)

A Girl Named Amanda

By K.S. Lewis (April 19, 2009)

 

  

Once upon a time there was a girl named Amanda that lived in Chicago Illinois. She grew up in a small town in Ohio and she missed it sometimes. She used to play in the little creeks around her farm and she was always getting muddy. There was something about dirt and water and corn plants that were ever so tall.

 

So sometimes she thought she would go back to the farm and play in the mud again but she was always getting too busy to go back and so she was sad. She said to her friend over the Internet:

I bet it is spring

And the trees are about to bud

The ice is melting into mud

That was my time to sing.

 

Her friend said, "It’s not so far away, the city from the farm. Why don’t you just pick a day?"

Amanda sighed, "this city is a million miles away from the country. I would need to get boots for the mud and jeans to replace my dresses. Most of all I would be sad if I just went for a day. It would be like just a single sunray peeking through the clouds on a stormy day that suddenly goes away. "

Now it was her friend’s turn to sigh. "You don’t need to plan so much, just drive away one day South from the city. Maybe take a camera and call it an adventure. Don’t tell anyone you’re coming so if you get lost on your adventure you don’t have to show up at all. Who knows where you might end up on such a gala day."

Amanda was very responsible. She had work to do, yet she had wind whistling in her brain. So she put on some disguises so she would forget who she was. She looked just like this:

 

 

Now she didn’t even know who she was so she pretended that she was a secret agent investigating the country. She rented a car and used a different name: Sunrainy. She even made up a little poem about her name:

Some days it rains in the city.

Some days the sun comes out.

But in the country rainy days are sunny days

Sunny days in the country simply daze me.

She took her notebook with her and a drawing pad and of course her sunglasses and scarf. When she bought gas to go south she used an English accent which she thought went well with her plaid scarf. She couldn’t do a Scottish accent or Welsh accent but she thought that a Cockney accent would go best with her outfit.

She drove South for a long ways and suddenly the city streets turned into grassy pastures cornrows and soybeans. She’d forgotten the smells of greenery and of animals. She curled her nose when she drove past a farm with a lot of hogs. She looked like this:

 

 

Anyway she stopped and opened the valve on the green pipe that she gave the nickname the big Green Knight. So the big Green Knight opened onto the field and Amanda was excited that she could go slipping and sliding around the field while no one was watching. But she miscalculated because the water in the big green pipe was really not water it was from the Holstein cows that she had passed by on the road. Soafter she opened the big green valve she went out to slip and slide in the mud. But she was really surprised and very happy because well you’ll see why… And this is how she looked. Because it was really a whole pipeline of whipped cream.

 

 

There was a little mud mixed in too and so Amanda got to slide around in whip cream and mud to her heart’s delight. She thought what a perfect day this has been and then she noticed that clouds had gathered over her head and a perfect little rainstorm came while the sun beamed all around even through each raindrop and there were three perfect rainbows one to the east one to the west and one to the south. She thought to herself, "I have so many options in which way to follow the rainbow." So the rain washed off the whip cream and mud and I’m not quite sure which way Amanda drove, but it wasn’t back to the city. And I imagine she found a few cows that wanted to chat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Birthday Present For Father

This is a strange birthday card but it is what it is.                               

 

December 7, 2008.  4 a.m. I woke and am using Dragon Speak to write in my journal.

My father’s name is Donald Rogers Lewis.  Father’s birthday is today and this constitutes my birthday card, letter and present all wrapped in one.

I do not know my first memory of you, father, but I explore my mind to find out if I know.  First though, I do remember the last time we saw each other. 

Thank you mom and dad for taking me to Hastings to catch the train.  Father, we shook hands at the train depot on Tuesday night December 2, 2008.   Now it is your birthday, your 78^th birthday, and I want to say happy birthday. 

 

Each moment of our lives can be the best moment ever and now I try to remember those moments I shared with you.  Thus this moment is exquisite for me and hopefully for you as well as you hear these words.  I added two pictures at the end.  You said you wanted some pictures I took.  I’ll send some more separately.

I knew we lived in Lincoln, actually I don’t remember that, but I do remember Grand Island.  I remember you  listening to records of Spanish words. Certainly,  I remember looking at the records.   But, I don’t remember a lot about Grand Island and nothing about Lincoln.  But looking at things from a location point of view requires looking at more locations than just Grand Island. 

There was a farm and I don’t remember you buying it just that we had it and that we farm on weekends.  I remember fixing fence with you amidst the goose berry bushes next to the bridge just below the lane on the original 240.  And I remember  you putting me on a popping John Deere tractor, I think it may have been an A John Deere to pull some implement across the field in the bottom field North of the barn and to the East of the Little Blue River that meanders through the 240. Those memories must have been before we moved to Bladen. 

 I remember the summer fallow being a bit weedy but mostly I remember the birds who pretend to have a broken wing and cry loudly as they drag their  broken wing across the soil.  I don’t remember asking about those birds but I imagine I did. Kildeer.

 I remember you teaching me how to pull the clutch on the tractor.  It seemed almost impossible to pull it.  I remember you wearing leather gloves and me wearing brown cotton gloves.  I always wanted to wear leather gloves too, eventually I did.  I remember you having a 38 caliber pistol or was a 45.  I remember shooting it and burning my left hand because I put my left hand under the barrel. I remembered that I shot the revolver near the red anthill by the little bin near the barn of the 240.  Speaking of the bin, I remember having seed wheat in the little bin by the barn on the 240.  I remember we started out with Scout wheat and then change to Scout 66. When was that?

I remember the house where the roping chutes are now, actually it was not in that exact place.  I remember the pump, I remember the pump not working and use swearing a bit as you fixed it.   I remember you breaking ice on the round cattle water tank and I remember there being big orange fish in the tank.  I always wondered how they lived through the winter.  I don’t remember if I ask you that.

 I remember you putting up a basketball hoop in the barn on the 240.  I don’t know if that hoop is still there or not.  I also remember you putting up a basketball hoop on the east side of the garage in town and eventually putting up the backboard and hoop on the south side of the garage in town. 

I remember you catching my pitches for many years and putting up the bales of hay so I could throw at them and then eventually a tarp. But before that came a worn-out rubber tire on an orange crate leaned against the barn in town.  That led to a hole in the barn.  But going back I think I remember remember playing catch in Grand Island on the front yard.

 I also remember an old push lawnmower but I don’t know if I specifically remember seeing you use it.  I do remember you showing me the pile of sugar beets at the American Crystal plant which to me seemed like it was immediately next door to our house in Grand Island.

 And I remember the streets were not perfectly east and west and you talking about that is why I couldn’t tell directions.  And I remember seeing you in a play, something about a dog or a man in a dog suit.  I don’t remember exactly.

 I remember you reading Shakespeare as well but it seems that that was in Bladen.  I remember you reading a bit about the three witches in the play whose name cannot be mentioned in the theater.  I especially remember the two bucket calves that we kept in the back yard in Bladen fenced in by irrigation pipe which I believe was 10 inch pipe instead of 8 inch  pipe. Named after the witches: Gray Malkin and Paddock.  Oddly enough I remember you discussing with me the issue of whether to buy 10 inch pipe or 8 inch pipe.  Did that discussion occur?  What are the reasons to buy 10 inch pipe?  It’s heavy as hell!  I think it was because you had to pump up hill somewhere.  Well, it’s 4:30 a.m. now and I I better go back to sleep.  However I will send this off to Dianne first.  Have a happy birthday. 

Love Kurt