Day 3: Library

Inspired by the words of the legendary artist, Picasso who said, "Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

Give me a library

And I’ll fill it.

Shelves stacked ceiling high with stirring memories;

Piles on piles of resonant lyrics.

I will illuminate the reading room with flame of my inner mystery;

Paint a panorama of personal odyssey on the ceiling.

And seal every word with the throb of my heart like a stamp.

Give me one moment in time

And I will illustrate the details in a grain of sand.

I will lay out the rhymes line by line

And know glee as the vowels fall to the page.

Give me a pen and I’ll write off mortality

And explode off the page.

Give me a slip of paper,

And I’ll pull off a caper.

One word chasing the other and that another each falling into a set pattern.

I’ll fill the hollows of nature with the sound of my utterance.

Give me weeds running amuck in a nursery

And I’ll invent a garden made entirely of verse.

Give me a journal spiraled and empty

And I will give the roaring of the sea moment of pause.

Give me my vital breathing space

And I will deal out exotic verbs,

Interweave each delicate syllable like a lace.

The whole world is my papyrus.

And I will carve annals on its surface in glittering hieroglyphs.

I’ll reproduce the silence of the river right before it busts over the cliffs

And morphs into waterfalls. I’ll translate to words the groans of the geyser

One moment before it gushes out the earth’s bowels in a furious shower.

Give me a set of watercolors

And I’ll stipple a fairytale on a canvas of reality.

I’ll walk the extent of inspiration’s corridors,

And explore the minute properties of ingenuity.

Until I sip on the nectar of limitless fecundity.

And then, it’ll start all over again;

Every day will be the first day.

Give me one minute

And I’ll stretch the breadth of each millisecond to infinity.

Give me a grain of sand,

And I’ll write a library.

I’ll make each volume grand,

As exquisite as a collection of antiques in a gallery.

Give me the sum-total of nothingness

I will take it and craft the beauty of lilies.

Give me grime, a dime and time

It’s all I require to teach a soul to fly.

Give me the meekness of a dog

And the greatness of a god

And long after I’m gone, the world will remember “I was here.”

Give me a broken chord

And I’ll weave the Ekpo dance till heaven draws near;

Speed up the displacement reaction in the atmosphere.

Give me the clouds

And I’ll erase the skyline with perpetual sculptures;

Aeonian monuments whose auras reach out,

Day after day hanging up there like cosmic infrastructures.

Give me innocence

I’ll reinvent Michelangelo’s David.

Straddle a morsel of persistence

I'll shoot for the stars and this feeling is fervid.

My tomorrows nudge me with promises of good things.

Give me an oracle

And I’ll prophecy to the four winds

And from the womb spit mysteries to the last article.

Give me a soul

And I’ll make angels wish they’re human;

Let me resolve

The remaining puzzle that completes the glory of man.

Give me a room and a door

And I’ll set to writing until I drop.

Give me tomorrow

And I’ll reverse the earth’s revolution with the force of my goals.

Give me here and now

And I'll raze Mt. Vesuvius to the ground.

I came to give all I received.

I will depart this plane when I’m given.

Give me a library, if you dare;

And I’ll go to the grave my mind emptied, my palms bared.

Akpan

In A Place Of Our Own

One of our deepest needs as individuals is to have that special slot we can call our own. You know, sort of an emotional wiggle room where we explore our more homely selves or we explode into a million shining details of genius. A refuge we crawl into and turn our backs to the rest of the universe.

Deep within the caverns of our nature, there is a place we all go when we need a hideaway from distractions. For the writer as for every man.

Providence gave us hearts, besides other reasons, as a retreat, an alcove to unwind in utter abandonment. In that we possess all liberties to explore, to the minutest detail, our own private universes with all the interruptions of this world muffled.

We cannot deny it, that our subtlest inventions are most tempted to swim upstream and break surface when we dally in the belly of the great alone. We climb higher when we reach deeper into the depths of solitude. And it's true what they say, "Everybody deserves a day away from hassles", or something like that.

As writers we owe it to our muse, a sense of duty and we are much obliged to fulfill it. Set a date to carve out a vital writing space – some place where our muse can explode, the cauldron of juices boil over and where we can find the desired calm to run down the day's activities. A nook where we are most at home with our real self. Experienced writers have said it; Most of us do our best writing in a place of our own.

You can start by moving that writing desk of yours to some place that offers a nice view, by a window possibly. CREATE a space you can really call your "writing space" and start fitting in stuff that can boost your literary ego. Objects and articles that can feed itchy fingers. A queer shaped mug filled with assorted pens and colorful pencils; a bulletin board; or even a bookshelf and so on. Try to save up enough money and at the end of every month add one more item to your library collections.

Training your senses to respect your quiet place brings with it a kind of dignity. You can't shake the feeling that you are a writer when you approach that spot.

Whatever triggers your juices ought to be in your writing room or top the list in your budget. This is one piece you can't sweep under the rug and look the other way. If you can straddle that line sure you can hold your breath 'cause in a minute, you'll look back and find the clouds are far, far behind you.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

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