Only the Rugged Survive

This poem marks my 700th post in 7 years (2009-2016)

Afraid to wake up,

Scared witless of sleep,

Why ya’ll gatto fake up,

When the truths within sleep.

The beginning deepens

The spiteful frustration in the end.

Purposelessness weakens

Hardline juvenile diligence.

In this broad daylight nightmare

I’ve come to recognize as mine,

Life is handout welfare.

Only the rugged survive.

Akpan

Down to Struggle

In the belly of the beast,

The streets consume me like a feast.

Along comes betrayal, hate is yeast

But in no way the least.

To survive with my fist

Is not my wish

So I’m down to struggle hard before I accomplish.

Heat is rain on this rubble,

Food tastes like gravel,

Ghetto healthcare will make you marvel.

I’m a grown man

With great dreams and plans

But I’m yet to understand

Whether my future falls or stands.

Akpan

Bargain Price

Young dreams die for a bargain price,

Out of a job for years in my prime,

Victimized by high-class hard stares,

Underrated by peers.

Born before my time.

Hardly recognized,

Fragments of peace achieved by a fight.

My thoughts are a conflict.

My imaginations are about war.

My very feelings afflict me.

The stress I see

Is greater than men could perceive,

It’s the promise of a seed

That increases the loss I grieve.

Akpan

Phases of Unrest

Visions thro a glass darkly

Explain the repercussion of expecting too much briefly.

The valleys I’ve come thro

Produce irrepressible proof of more to tunnel thro.

Building hopes and dreams

On desolations that overflow the brim

I’m hearing my soul scream

The situation creating insanity,

Throwing my mind on the theory of impossibility.

It’s a world of unfeeling

And my courage is careening

Out of control the only way to address

The last phase of unrest,

Is to stage a protest.

Akpan

Blame it On Blaine

A poem inspired by the hell train in Stephen King's

Dark Tower IV; Blaine the Mono.

A ride on a hell train

Can’t convey such strain.

The aim’s to best Blaine;

But my brain’s so lame,

Faking snakes on a plane,

Headaches turn migraine.

This Blaine train’s a pain,

Riddle me this riddle me straight,

I can’t beat this it aint in my trait.

I’m stuck in a rage of a race.

I’m on center stage of a craze.

The street’s a blur it’s insane,

If I quit the riddles I get slain,

I hear Blain snivel maybe it’s the rain.

Akpan

Mma Mi

My Mama, the Deaconess Eka Akpan celebrates one more

year on God's Earth today. Happy Birthday Mma.

"Mma mi" (/hmm ma me/) is Ibibio for My Mama.

Love needed no reason,

To set me up with a special person;

Love’s only reason was love itself,

Mma, having you translates as blessed.

I’m gonna write my manger story on you;

A prose on how faithful love beat the odds.

Wise men found a star on the night of the first Yule,

Mma, you are that ancient star in human form.

You were my anchor when I stormed thro a fog,

Your voice was the oil that stilled my troubled sob,

No room in the inns Mma, your heart was my pod:

A tested refuge from the cattle of this cold sod.

Akpan

I Wish You

Courtesy: merrychristmas.quotems.com

I wish you joy that comes with the season,

I wish you goodness that fills your reminisces,

I wish you smiles that light the candles bright,

I wish you strength that comes from the Christ-Child,

I wish you beauty, grace that lasts the year long,

I wish you the vigor of youth your whole life long,

I wish you hope that never dies but multiplies,

I wish you the small things that stir the flame in your eyes.

I wish you a home full of Christmases,

I wish you love that came down from excelsis,

I wish you tools so foolproof you’ll have ecstasies,

I wish you surplus of the bare necessities,

I wish you simplicity first witnessed in a manger,

I wish you the blessings that addeth no sorrow,

I wish you peace that truss the silence of the stars,

I wish you above all, forever hands to hold.

Akpan

A Man Like Mandela

Nelson Mandela
Courtesy: gettyimages.com

Mandela,

Like Mandela,

A man like Mandela,

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

I wanna be the face of courage,

I wanna be the essence of positive rage,

I wanna be the radar that keeps focus in range.

I wanna be the prime axis of change;

I wanna be the reason to turn the page,

I wanna be the item that gets your wits engaged.

I wanna be the spotlight of my own Madiba;

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

I wanna be the symbol of what makes a man.

I wanna make solitary confinement something grand;

I wanna be the bond of unity in a divided land,

I wanna take fear and bend it into triumph.

I wanna seize emancipation with no strings attached;

I wanna make my name a synonym for survivor.

I wanna be the shape of hope and its father;

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

Mandela,

Like Mandela,

A man like Mandela,

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

Akpan

Dream I Am

My soul has sight of that immortal sea

My goal has the potential of a seed

If you had eyes it aint impossible to see

Just a fraction of the dream I am

Has got property to revive a dead man.

Akpan

Simple Creed

I emerge

From the turbulence of controversy

To surge

Like the waves of a riotous sea.

Akpan

Nature's Opus

Nature’s own veritable opus

Can’t phantom me a unit of your caucus

I can’t imagine myself slave of a nobler class

Loser, chew the grass

I know who I am

That cannot be revoked by so-called everybody

Trade the genius of me for a scam

Is an idea more unreal than a fantasy,

Akpan

Unconcealed Curiosity

An existence that aint real

Neither abstract nor flicker of a dream

Threatens the life I lead

Unconcealed curiosity

Lures me into the deepest deep

Of Divinity’s secrets for my entity

What I see

Is the bedrock of ingenuity

The eventual futility

Of self-generated crowd mentality

Along the boulevard of misery.

Akpan

Pauper's Bio

I engage myself

In profitable enterprise

I would crave a word from my conscience

Like self-invoked sacrifice

Today is the inception

Of tomorrow’s memoirs

I will re-invent history

With a pauper’s biography.

Akpan

Something Greater Than You

Stand back and watch

Something greater than you’s about to forge

One man’s about to make a difference

And introduce a point of reference

Cause threading the footprint of fools

Is one surefire way to lose.

Akpan

Undivided

A fool and his destiny are soon parted

I’m so undivided

Tho my locus

Makes disregarded individuals raucous

I am one among many

Never to be mistaken for one of many

I am fortified by a personal will

A youth who uses his heart with skill.

Akpan

Dangerous Interpretations

My metabolism evicting hypocrisy

The voices of the majority

Couldn’t blind me to reason

I would not betray reality

For a sip of the betrayer’s wine

Just to dine in your mess like swine

To lose focus

And become bogus

At this time is the interpretation

Of the word dangerous.

Akpan

Hotter Than Ether

Curb your enthusiasm

Your manifestos are fragments of a phantasm

See me stand in the funnel of apocalypse

Like a verse of prophecy

What’s all these bickering

Can’t you see nobody’s listening?

I want to live my life

For something that will last forever

I want to witness my purpose bind

While I stay on the grind hotter than ether.

Akpan

I Will Fear No Pain

Bedraggled and worn to shreds

Standing out here in the rain

The lyrics of my poems

Erase my pain

I will fear no pain

Nor detour from the standard I have set

I open both eyes of my mind simultaneously

To speculate on diseases annihilating ignoramuses

My contemporary suffering itinerary deficiency

Yet my reflexes are engaged by proficiency.

Akpan

I'm Made

With nothing to lose

But a couple hundred fools

And their ill-advised tools

I break free from hypocrisy

I’m losing sight of this sedated fantasy

Humanity

Rotting in a cemetery of split personality

Before my birth

My destiny was preordained

Nobody can squirt

My history cause I’m made.

Akpan

Pleasures of Fools

I can recognize treachery

Especially when displayed in a gallery

To turn my future over to the limbs of deceit

Corroborates a picture perfect defeat

As my days draw to an end

I wanna be proud that I did apprehend

All personal goals for an everlasting payment

Conveyed on the pinions of personal achievement

Because trading my soul for the pleasures of fools

Is exactly what I require to fold and lose.

Akpan

By My Own Rules

From the cradle of hate,

More than minds anticipate,

I blaze

From the womb of the sacred page.

Lyrical like an opus

My eye on the platinum.

Seething

Like the content of a cauldron.

The stubbornness of my will is bleating

The world’s been patiently waiting,

My prophecy steadily manifesting.

The seed I am is sprouting

Thro rock solid concrete.

My dream will breathe

To the maximized degree

Thro a determination that speaks

Greater things than competition tweaks

I am here between two brothers, two traitors

Two thieves; two fools

With panther power surviving by my own rules.

Akpan

Who They Fooling?

Institutions make money out of the youth’s misery

Preaching it’s all necessary

To prove whose heart’s really into schooling.

Guess you wonder who they think they’re fooling.

Breaking all the rules

And cooking up the cock and bulls.

It’s irritating

When you realize the stuff’s really permeating

The society and the stench is polluting

Personal standards and depreciating.

Akpan

Healthy Hearts Bleed

Healthy hearts bleed,

The government retaliates with refined greed,

This stock of corruption is of a rare breed.

Friends flee from feeling in a time of need

Prospects is illin like a diseased seed

We grow up too fast

But the sensation don’t last.

Akpan

Drop of a Pin

To be in this crippled position

Is like braving a volcanic eruption

Tears

Flow via paralyzing fears

What is enough?

Before dust returns to dust

The blood of victims of suicide

Bombers scream out in a heady outcry

Shall an Ethiopian change his skin?

Hear the roar of thunder at the drop of a pin.

Akpan

Evening of Our Lives

Stars dim in a wink,

Stronger hearts sink,

Minds of men scarcely think.

In the evening of our lives,

I cast my bread upon the waters

It’s arrant hypocrisy I find

And every particle of unreality just binds.

Contrary to presupposition

There be many adversaries

Who oppose my stated mission,

Ever-present staunch egotistical emissaries.

Akpan

Mastermind Engaged

Tomorrow’s ashes

Snuff out today’s flashes,

Darkness prevails

Beyond better days.

Sin so thick,

You could hang full grown men by its thread.

Mutual hate is so deep

Ethnic discrepancy richly spread.

Life is a picture perfect crisis.

And the sun of self-delusion persistently rises.

Growth of any kind is discouraged,

And the mastermind is engaged.

Akpan

Godfather Theory

But what bright sparks invented the Godfather

Theory, you wonder!

Mystery interwoven into the fabric of fantasy

Half-boiled truths and lousy dichotomy,

Irate corruption overruns the economy.

Dog eat dog it’s the world we living in.

That’s the reason I rhyme in elegies.

The times infest me with allergies.

Down on bended knees

Tranquility is fleeced.

They believe the prophecy

Yet run with apostasy.

Akpan

The Oracles are Dumb

Here I stand

On the fringes of insanity,

Compensated by near-mortality;

The oracles are dumb.

The feelers of conscience are numb.

Friends dissolved in the fires of persecution,

Fickle like the senate amending the constitution,

Money’s the open sesame into every institution,

And the motive of all academic pursuit,

Yet they deceive the youth.

Akpan

Chronicles of Memory

I falter

At the waking thought of dilemma,

Offered as sacrifice

To the crocodiles of the Nile.

Pain enslaves

My faculty, pressed to the grave

Yesterday breathes again

In the chronicles of my memory.

Like birth pangs on a virgin

Unfamiliar with my kind of reality,

I express an exceedingly split personality

And my ecstasy

Is a reinventing of soulful misery.

Akpan

Correspondent Repercussion

Troubles beseech,

Deserting all on the throes of a stitch,

Resident evil aint that nice a neighbor,

Water verse to kill waterborne horrors.

Virtue slumbers

Like a log of timber,

Correspondent repercussion

Catalyzing a fusion of sedated confusion.

Thro a glass briefly,

I study my surroundings swiftly.

Faith is rewarded with hell’s option,

Prototype drama adoption.

Akpan