A Piece Of Broken Moon

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A shard of shattered glass

Conveys the sentence of doom

In the toppled blocks of a class

Thru a piece of broken moon,

Stark remnants of gloom

When things fell down flat.

‘Stay-at-home' was mastered

To something of a craft

When an earthquake rode thru town

And gave it a runaround.

School structures came tumbling down

A cruel blow to the eased lockdown

People got trapped underground

Screaming then fade to no sound

A 7.2 magnitude

With an overblown attitude

Made buildings crumble

And pounded hopes to rubble,

There's always a shrapnel of faith

After the storm has spent its rage

Lurking in a tucked away cage,

Waiting for its unique prison break

Big dreams are made of these

Be the reason they can relate,

Bind the wound where it bleeds

We can help children believe

So the past need not be relived.

Akpan

Strange Odyssey

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Let me hold your hand

It'll be all I need to stand

I'm not one to make demands

Still I'll go with you to strange lands. 

Akpan 

How To Get There

Don't knock it
Strip down to the bare necessities.
Don't pull in on your way back,
If you lock it, you got it hacked.
Tell no one.
This is top secret.
Mum's the word.
Make your mission your statement.
Let your mind feed your eyes,
Set your eyes on the prize.
Hold it straight and focused
And define your locus.
Shed the dead weight
Kill the delay.
Through a singleness of mind,
Put your program on the grind.
Step out, test the waters
If hot, wade the gutters.
Take the ladder
One rung at a time.
And if you can straddle this rhyme,
Add skill and here's what you do;
You'll look back to see if you're fine,
And find the sky far behind you.

Akpan

What Sir Taught Me About Talent

Back when I was a child (to coin a phrase and a swell one too if I may add), I would lock myself up in my room, turn my back to the world, set the muse to work and, explore all the depths of my creativity. There were times I skipped meals and just got lost in my muse creating lyrics. A feeling of nostalgia often accompanies my recall of those early days of trying and failing and you can readily associate if your childhood hobby morphed into a lifelong career.

Sir (if you have read my post “On Identity,” you know I called my father, “Sir”) was well aware of my obsession—how could he not, I spent more time writing than I did doing anything else. I recall one uneventful evening, that’s one day which has evolved into one of the most memorable of my entire life. An unusual hush garbed the entire household. The way I remember it I suppose my sibs were out playing soccer on some stubbed patch of undeveloped lot.

My improvised desk flaunted a clutter of school notebooks. I was buried in the pages of an exercise book flanking the heap when Sir invaded the privacy of my room.

                “I haven’t seen you do too much song writing, lately,” He said, his fatherly aura eclipsing my tiny frame.

The smile, which abruptly, lit up my face, came uninvited and uninhibited because I felt I just had my legs pulled.

Don't get me wrong, though. Sir was a big fan-he loved me and loved what I did.

                 “Seriously.” He eyed me the way fathers do when they're trying to make you pay attention. “You've not been writing those lyrics of yours like you used to.”

Sir went on to tell me something that rearranged my overall psyche and triggered a new sense of purpose within.

1. Your Talent is ‘Who’ You Are

You can't discover the inner self and not find your talent. Towing the same line, you can't straddle your talent and not know who you really are.

                “That’s one reason sloths can’t discover who they really are,” Sir said.

If someone has talent, they still have to work very hard if they want to be very good at something. Some people become quite good at something even if they do not have much talent, but if they are willing to work very hard at the skill. Some people “waste their talent” (they have talent but do not work hard at it, they do not “use their talent”). — Wikipedia

"Inspiration exists but it has to find us working." Picasso

2. Your Talent Ought to Define Your Career

This line rather blows its own trumpet. Nevertheless, that's not the situation much of the time. With unemployment and underemployment running the game and as we all know, a man's gotta eat, sometimes, we defer.
Fact remains you can't be waist deep in your talent and still be, metaphorically speaking, out of a job.

Once you find something you love to do, do more of it. You will improve your skills and refine your technique this way.  WikiHow

You should consider making a career of it and help change the world with something only you could rightly show off.

  

3. Your Talent is No. 1 Priority

Here's what Sir said to me, "Education was invented so gifted people could learn from like-minded folks who have through drill perfected their craft." (I can name a few of my high school teachers who signed up for the job because they ran out of options, though.) "People get an education to polish raw talent. The intent wasn't to get a qualification you can't defend for beans so you can apply for a fine job that pays handsomely."

You should nurture your talent by finding a teacher, even if it's just somebody else with more experience at something who can give you advice. WikiHow

“Thomas Edison (electricity), Benjamin Banneker (clock), Garret Morgan (traffic light), Henry Ford (automobile), and Alexander Graham Bell (telephone) had 8th to 12th grade education.

Bill Gates (Microsoft), Ted Turner (CNN), Bill Lear (Lear Jet), Soichiro Honda (Honda cars), and Howard Hughes (Hughes aircraft) never earned a college degree.

These geniuses had average IQ but made the world a better place by using their intuition.” — The New York Times

That's my idea of a well-rounded education. As Sir said, “In a difficult situation where your talent is pitched against 'formal' education, choose your talent.” Put differently, do it in a heartbeat. No questions asked (to coin a phrase).

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

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Have You Seen My Childhood?

Me in third or fourth grade.
That's actually a passport photo from my report card

I remember growing up as a child and learning to read and write – ha! ha! That’s a laugh – I couldn’t read worth a darn until fourth grade. But I could write and it was a thrill to know there was no law against that.

The first big vocabulary I taught myself to spell (it’s never quite escaped my memory, you know) was the word: Because. Go ahead and laugh your head off if you have to but back then in third grade, Because was a whole mouthful for me. I can recall sitting in the middle of the classroom, inside one of those makeshift school buildings called Jakande Blocks; the then governor of Lagos state, Mr. Jakande had set off building of low-cost classrooms at the onset of the Free Education Program. I was staring at the chalkboard and wondering for the life of me if ever I was going to master the English language with so many vocabularies to memorize.

Things and places have souls. I think I can attest to that fact being one weaned by the navel of the soul. Childhood dreams which, by and large shape our adult lives are one of these things with souls.

I hydroplaned through first to third grades having my examination and test papers read to me by my class teachers. Was that fair? It wasn’t a special privilege, if that’s the question on your lips; there were several other pupils as dumb as I was, and a few were royally bird-brained. At least my teachers didn’t have to feed me the answers. Give me that much credit.

You see, I was a smart kid trapped behind the language barrier. The last time I checked even diplomats were not beyond the ugly beast. Why else would they hire the service of an interpreter?

My life has always been a drive to decipher the mystery of language, to interpret its nuances, the tone and mood of sentences, and the rhythm of words. It seems to me that my entire life is hooked on the poetry of language.

And here’s the reason, I think, that ties it all together and gives my thirst wholeness of purpose: as a child, I copied sentences from books and the dictionary–my family owned this early hardcover edition of The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (Of or in, I can’t remember which though; I think one was replaced with the other by the publishers in subsequent editions.)

            “What do you think you’re doing, Eneh? You know you can’t read!”

I do remember my brothers teasing me. Often, if I could afford the luxury of altercation, I gave my enthusiastic reply:

            “Yeah, but someday I’ll be able to and then, I’ll return to these pages and figure out for myself what exactly I was up to all that time!”

I think that fixed them though, I don’t think they meant any harm. I suppose they were just curious.

Many waters have passed under the bridge since that bout of analphabetism was broken. The force of the realization was as audible as cymbals clapped really close to one’s ears. I’ve devoured books spanning literally every subject under the sun since my childhood years.

It appears to me that my fascination with books and language thus far has been in defiance of the humiliation I endured growing up preliterate; I feel renewed like a leaf going its metamorphic rounds each time I read or write. It’s like a message from that kid copying notes he couldn’t read:

            “I guess I figured it out for myself, after all!”

Keep your pens bleeding.

 Akpan

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The Learning Curve

A little girl leaning against a sofa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There isn’t a single thing we do in life that we do not learn by imitation. The basic tool of learning and one of its most efficient is imitation.

From our first steps as toddlers, as we attempted and failed in the quest to stroll on the soles of our feet-and not our palms and kneecaps scrubbing the length of the floor-to the earliest moments we began sprinting with a measure of gait in our bounce, we are products of imitation. We imitated our parents, a brother, a sister, a classmate, our teacher, or a close neighbor. And there is an infinitely interesting fact about this thing: the learning curve is one hard knock college nobody ever graduates from.

We thrive from our experiences and as we know better, we do better. But, we never actually stop learning. We become mature in decision-making; we understand the weight of our choices, yes, much more than we did as toddlers; we become men in handling our own affairs. Mama doesn’t have to watch out for us anymore and make sure we do not fall in the pot of soup or tumble down the staircase while trying to play Superman like the kid in the old Nigerian children short story, ‘Ade our Naughty Lil’ Brother’.

If any man actually graduates from this institution, he has no right to teach. The man who stops learning, stops growing and ultimately stops living. If you are trying to give what you don’t possess, now that’s a bigger gamble than a pack of dice and God help your pupil.

Life presents to us, numerous privileges, each of these enrich us in a special way. The moments of life are brimming with resources; heaven’s providence sent to haul us through the corridors of improvement. We pile up nuggets of useful information when we open our hearts and embrace life with a little bit of sincerity and a truckload of simplicity.

The law of imitation, not the tendency to fake it. The simple creed of learning from another can happen to us through anybody. (And really, it never stops happening.) They do not have to be older or more educated in such matters than we are. We continue by bonding our hearts and spirits through the principle of sharing. And the reality stands undisputed we can never chance the stages of self-discovery unless we imitate in the minutest of things.


Keep your pen bleeding!




Akpan

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