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

"Piz, piz" (The Picasso Legacy)

Old guy with a guitar by Picasso

I have something that might interest you.

Never mind the title of my post. It’s not an attempt to plagiarize Dan Brown’s work. Matter-of-factly, it’s the furthest thing on my mind at the moment. You could say it’s a shot at reinforcing Pablo Picasso’s words,

My mother said to me, “if you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Don’t you just adore the audacity of that declaration? What does it take to be able to quote you; to stand on the mountaintop and speak across the stretch of a lifetime, and have the echo of your words carry across meadows, out-of-the-way prairies, through the most unlikely crannies of the earth many generations after your soul dissolves into eternity?

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first words were ‘piz, piz ’, a shortening of ‘lápiz’, the Spanish word for ‘pencil’.  Wikipedia

Picasso

In 1900, after studying Art in Madrid, Picasso moved over to Paris where he made friends with Max Jacob (journalist and poet) with whom he shared apartment. They had a sort of sleeping timetable. Max maxed out at night, while Picasso stole a wink during the day and worked all night long. Those were tough days and reeked of cold and despair, so Picasso torched quite a few of his work to keep the small room warm.

Really, I’m not about to do a run up of Picasso’s bio you can look that up on Wikipedia if you like. These are vital lessons from a simple, extraordinary life. Something anybody who finds it in their heart to be sincere about their personal call in life ought to take and run with it.

He can who thinks he can, Picasso says, and he can’t who thinks he can’t.

Portrait by Picasso

Is it really possible to surround yourself with all the tools of a life on the verge of explosion – a dream, ambition, and ammunition – and still miss the mark? Oh, I’ve heard of people missing the mark by over a mile riding popular opinion. But this is as different from that as a whiff from a whim.

Close your eyes and imagine a picture perfect portrait of you in other people’s opinion.  Now, create another picture, this time on a personal canvas, a painting of you as who you ought to be. Step back and assess your progress in the race to the finish line.

Have you been a butt kisser?

Would your life, ten to twenty years from this moment in time echo Picasso’s words?

Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. The total number of artworks he produced has been estimated at 50,000, comprising 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, roughly 12,000 drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.  Wikipedia

My hope is that in this brief diagram of a life fulfilled you have witnessed something more to challenge you for the rest of your life.

Let your pen bleed!

Akpan

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