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Sunday 31 January 2016

PIANO SCORE CHART FOR MIRACLE BY MARVIN SAPP

A little tease for my pianist out there
ENJOY!!!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Miracle by Marvin Sapp Progression

This post is in response to a request made by someone on one of my posts. In this post I'm giving out the chords (Left and Right hands) to the song Miracle as simply as I can and I hope it really helps your playing. The song is in the key of E flat.

Note that I put some of the chords there without the left hand part(Those are the chords that stand alone without another chord beside it i.e seperated with a slash) and the ones that have 2 slashes signify that you hold the left hand part of the chord while you play the other 2 right hand chords one after the other.

Chorus

It's
G Bb Eb/F Bb Eb G,
your
G Bb Eb/G C F

Time for your miracle...
Bb C Eb G, Bb D Eb F, G Ab C Eb, F Ab B D, G Bb C F, G Bb C# E

You press your way...
Eb G Ab C, Bb F Ab/C Eb Bb/B D G Bb, G Bb C F, B F G/Bb Eb G

In the midst of the crowd
Bb D C F, G Bb C# E, Ab C Eb G

Came in anyway
Bb F/Ab C Eb F/Ab B Eb F, Eb Bb C#/F Ab C Eb/G C Eb,

I can hear you say within yourself...
Bb C Eb G, Ab D/F Bb D F, F A Bb D/F A C

If I can just touch...
Bb D Eb G

It's your time for your miracle....

UPDATE!!!

Life as a writer can be quite complicated. that is because the task of making it as a writer in an economy like Nigeria can be quite stressful.
So why you try to get that masterpiece of yours published, why not get yourself engaged in some fringe activities to keep the cash inflow.
I'm talking about writing contest
check out websites like: opportunitiesforafrica.com, freelancing.com, writersdigest.com, manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk, naijawriterscoach.com, writersincharge.com and a host of others
Basically, get yourself up and make money other ways while you wait for the big break...
I shall be uploading more opportunities for y'all. Of course you know the main aim of this platform is to make life easier for writers and musicians in Nigeria, Africa and other parts of the world
ciao...

Saturday 30 January 2016

FOR WRITERS INTERESTED IN PUBLISHING- culled from the writersdigest.com

Bring Diversity to Publishing—and to Your Bookshelf

Editor’s Note: The discussion of diversity in publishing has been ongoing for decades. Some authors take issue with their books being categorized as “African-American Literature,” “Women’s Fiction” or “LGBTQ” (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer). Others don’t object to the labels, but decry the difficulty of breaking in when publishers identify your readership as “niche.” At WD, we receive letters asking: Where are the black agents and editors? Why so few minorities on the bestsellers lists?
While we don’t have the answers, we’ve been heartened to see campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books taking social media by storm (diversebooks.org). In the spirit of change, we invited professor, award-winning author and National Black Writers Conference co-founder Elizabeth Nunez to contribute to the conversation as a part of our recent issue’s “It’s Never Too Late!” theme.
We want to hear your perspectives, too. Feel free to drop a note in the comments section and tell us what you think. 

ElizabethNunez_byLeonidKnizhnik-featured18853552This column from the magazine is by Elizabeth Nunez. Nunez is the award-winning author of eight novels and the memoir Not for Everyday Use. Her novel Even in Paradise, a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear, will be released in April 2016 to coincide with the 400th Anniversary of the Bard’s death. Nunez is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY.

Photo by Leonid Knizhnik.


Readers, those of you decrying the paucity of diverse books are about to get mad at me. To rephrase the famous line that propelled Bill Clinton to the presidency: It’s the money! Let me be clearer: Publishers will publish more diverse books if there are more readers for diverse books. The color is green in the publishing industry.
You challenge me. Must we, you say, the minority communities, bear the blame for the low numbers of diverse books published annually that deal with our lives as black, Latino and Asian Americans, books that reflect the lives of the LGBTQ community, the lives of the economically, socially, physically and mentally challenged? What about systemic racism? What about all the isms that shut people out: sexism, ageism, classism? Are publishers simply innocent bystanders taking their cues from the marketplace? Are they really not guilty of deliberately withholding the publication of books that deal with the experiences of minority populations?
A few years ago I attended the famous Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica. The much-revered poet Sonia Sanchez, one of the early members of the Harlem Writers Guild, was a speaker. At the end of her reading, which was delivered with equal portions of rage and celebration to the beat of her unique musical rhythms, the crowd thronged around her, peppering her with questions and compliments. When the audience finally thinned out, Sanchez turned to me, her face grim. “You see that crowd, Elizabeth,” she said. “They say they love me; they say they love my work. ‘Give us more, Sonia,’ they say. ‘Keep on writing.’ ‘Keep on inspiring us, giving us words to live by.’ But that same crowd will silence me.” (These are not her exact words, but an approximation.)
I was stunned. “How so, Sonia?”
She explained that the very fans who claim they adore her work won’t spend the money to buy a copy of her book. “They wear fancy sneakers, some costing over $100. But $25 for a book? Sonia, that’s too much money. Yet publishers won’t publish a writer whose book is not selling.”
The problem, however, is not simply that too many people do not buy books. Indeed, some publishers make fat profits. The problem is also that too many readers gravitate to books that will not disturb them out of their comfort zones.
Recently, for a course I teach at Hunter College of The City University of New York, I assigned my students the novel Crick Crack, Monkey by Merle Hodge, in which the main character confronts discrimination based on class and skin color. I have a first edition of the novel, published in England 45 years ago. On the cover is a picture of a young, very dark-skinned black girl who resembles the protagonist described in the novel. Her hair is thick, coiled and upswept in knots on either side of her head, and she wears a collared blouse. Surprisingly, I discovered that the picture on the cover of the new edition my students were using had been changed. The girl is not as dark-skinned, her hair is longer, the curls looser and she is wearing a halter top that exposes her bare shoulders.
Why did the publisher change the picture? Did the publisher think that the girl on the new cover would be more acceptable to readers? I know black writers who ask their publishers not to put their photographs on their book jackets. These writers understand, as publishers do, that a jacket cover is an advertisement for a book, and that there are certain images that could telegraph to readers that a certain book may not be “for them.”
But should we give the publishing industry a pass? Should we allow publishers that canard (for canard it seems to me) that they would publish more diverse books if there were more readers for such books?
The publishing industry has a responsibility to society. Publishers hold important keys to the advancement of our culture. They cannot be simply businesspeople, marketers, salespersons. Books have the power to transform us, to inspire us to become our better selves, to warn us against the dangers of worse selves.
The Word, as written in the Bible, and the writings of the Torah and the Quran have served as moral compass for more than 2,000 years for people of faith all over the world. Martin Luther King Jr. was armed with the Bible, but it was also writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, John Oliver Killens and Ralph Ellison who spread the word, inspiring not just African Americans to demand their civil rights but also people of the African diaspora around the world. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird opened the eyes of Americans to racial injustice but also to the unfair treatment of people with disabilities. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique set the tone for the women’s movement, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed the dangerous effects of pesticides on our health and the environment. And long before the Stonewall riots, the plays of Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment for his homosexual relationships raised the public’s consciousness to the pervasiveness of discrimination against the LGBTQ community. I could go on …
To borrow a metaphor from the much-quoted scholar M.H. Abrams, good literature is both mirror and lamp. In much the same way that a lamp illuminates, throws light on the dark and allows us to see more clearly, a good book tells us the truth about ourselves, about the human condition we all share, and inspires us to change for the better. When we have a plethora of books that in no way function as lamp but simply mirror majority communities while ignoring minority communities, we are in deep trouble, and I, for one, am very scared.
In the May 25, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard tries to grapple with the mind of the mass killer who, on an ordinary afternoon in Norway, on July 22, 2011, slaughtered 77 innocent souls, most of them children at a summer camp. “The shock in Norway was total,” writes Knausgaard. How could such a thing happen in a country known to be relatively homogeneous, well functioning and egalitarian? He writes: “The most powerful human forces are found in the meeting of the face and the gaze. Only there do we exist for one another. In the gaze of the other, we become, and in our own gaze others become. It is there, too, that we can be de-stroyed. Being unseen is devastating, and so is not seeing.”

And so, though there is logic in the contention of publishers that they would publish more diverse books if there were more buyers of diverse books, I want to point out the danger in their argument. It is when there is distance between us and the Other that our society breaks down. Evidence the tensions brought to light by recent coast-to-coast protests surrounding incidents of police brutality, and by last summer’s hate killings of nine people in a black church in South Carolina. A report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs documents 2,016 incidents of anti-LGBTQ violence in the U.S. in 2012, with LGBTQ people of color 1.8 times more likely to experience physical violence in the workplace and shelters compared to their white counterparts. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, that same year, 1.3 million persons age 12 or older who had disabilities experienced nonfatal violent crimes.
So, yes, as readers we need to acknowledge the exigencies of the market that determine the kind of books publishers will publish, but publishers need to understand that they have a crucial role to play in narrowing that distance between each of us and the Other. Racism, sexism, discrimination against others who are different from us thrive best in that widening space we too often allow ourselves between those who share our experiences and those who don’t. And our best hopes against the forces that would destroy us are books that tell the stories of the Other, that challenge us to engage with the Other, to see our common humanity, our human flaws, desires, failures and triumphs in the face of the Other.
As I watched CNN’s coverage of the spontaneous outpouring of people of all classes and colors in the streets of New York City after the announcement of the decision not to indict the police officers involved in the fatal chokehold of Eric Garner, I was struck by a comment made by legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. Why this massive response from the public? CNN’s panel of pundits wanted to know. Hadn’t the statistics about incidents of discrimination already been recounted and much publicized—disproportionate rates of arrests, excessive force by police, lengthy terms of incarceration for drugs that are ubiquitous on Wall Street? Toobin responded that it is not statistics that move people; it is story. And that night, the distance between the life of Eric Garner and the people of New York narrowed. We saw his face; we met his gaze. It was because of his story that we recognized our common humanity in him and we no longer could remain bystanders. We had to get involved.
We need books that are both mirror and lamp, books that mirror the breadth of our enormously rich and diverse experiences and cultural heritage, books that excite our aesthetic sensibilities, that stimulate us to think, that cause us to see ourselves in the Other. We cannot allow publishers to use the excuse that there is not a sufficient market for these books to sustain a profitable margin for their business. Publishers have a responsibility to develop audiences for these books. When publishers decide to put their marketing dollars behind a book, they quite often succeed. Most people rely on recommendations for the choices they make, say for a brand of car, toothpaste, a pharmaceutical. Look at the power Oprah has wielded with her book club.
Publishers need to use their clout to promote diverse books, and so do writers from minority communities, those who’ve achieved a strong following and monetary rewards, as well as those who’ve gained recognition with awards and prizes. A word of commendation from these writers to their influential networks, a blurb on the jacket of a new book, can attract the attention of the public to an otherwise overlooked title. Reviewers and literary organizations that support readings by writers, as well as grant awards, have an important role, too, in promoting diverse books. And we, readers, need to exercise our power and influence by purchasing diverse books. Books, stories about diverse communities, are not a luxury; they are a necessity.



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Friday 29 January 2016

AMAZING FACT FOR WRITERS-culled from electrikliterature.com


Academics at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland put over 100 famous novels through a detailed statistical analysis and found that an “overwhelming” number of the books had a fractal structure. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that is self-similar across different scales. To determine whether the books had fractal structures, the academics looked at the variation of sentence lengths, finding that each sentence, or fragment, had a structure that resembled the whole of the book.
The paper based on the study, recently published in Information Sciences, showed that certain works were more complex than others, specifically the books written in stream-of-consciousness. These could be compared to multi-fractals, according the scientists, who explained that Finnegans Wake by James Joyce had the most complex structure of all. Professor Professor StanisÅ‚aw Drożdż said: “The results of our analysis of [Finnegans Wake] are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals.”
finnegans wake
Image via IFJ PAN.
The horizontal axis represents the degree of singularity, while the vertical axis shows the spectrum of singularity.
graph fractals in lit
Image via IJF PAN.
Sequences of sentence lengths (as measured by number of words) in four books, representative of various degrees of cascading character.
Other books that had characteristics similar to multifractals include A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, The USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Joyce’s Ulysses. The paper made sure to note that a literary text will never have the perfect fractality of the world of mathematics, where fractals can be magnified to the infinite, because of the finite nature of a work of literature. There were some surprising works in the stream-of-consciousness genre that did not have fractal characteristics, such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Ayn Rand’s Atlas ShruggedDrożdż suggested that the scientists’ work may one day help assign books to genres in a “more objective” way.
Professor Drożdż also noted that their findings could mean stream-of-consciousness writers uncovered fractals in nature before scientists, explaining: “Evidently, they had a kind of intuition, as it happens to great artists, that such a narrative mode best reflects ‘how nature works’ and they properly encoded this into their texts. Nature evolves through cascades and thus arranges fractally, and imprints of this we find in the sentence-length variability.”

Thursday 28 January 2016

FOR WRITERS- culled from the huffingpost.com


Wednesday 27 January 2016

THE EIGHT WONDER OF THE WORLD









Take a Peek Inside Neil Gaiman's Library


Fantasy author Neil Gaiman's personal library is a book lover's dream, stuffed to the gills with all manner of novels, reference books, and anthologies, with the occasional gargoyle or mounted stuffed head for good measure.
Literary social network Shelfari visited Sandman and Coraline author Neil Gaiman at his Minnesota home and snapped these pictures of his personal library. Gaiman's basement is entirely filled with books, awards, and a handful of tchochkes. You can see more, larger images of the library here, but if you just want to know what books Gaiman keeps handy, Shelfari is in the process of creating a digital bookshelf based on the photos.
These pictures were taken by Kyle Cassidy, whose pictures of writers' workspaces we previously featured, and is currently compiling a book based on the photos.


Neil Gaiman's Bookshelves [Shelfari via Digital Composting]
Take a Peek Inside Neil Gaiman's Library
Take a Peek Inside Neil Gaiman's Library
Take a Peek Inside Neil Gaiman's Library
Take a Peek Inside Neil Gaiman's Library
Take a Peek Inside Neil Gaiman's Library




Tuesday 26 January 2016

FOR WRITERS- culled from theatlantic.com


                

 

Writers Should Look for What Others Don't See

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic discusses the importance of noticing hidden truths—from the horrors of war to the mundane aspects of daily life.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean
When I asked the Serbian-born poet Charles Simic to choose a favorite passage for this series, he asked to discuss Walt Whitman’s “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” The poem’s narrator apprehends a row of covered bodies outside a Civil War hospital, then lifts the blankets to contemplate each dead soldier’s face. Our conversation hinged on different ways of looking closely: the uncomfortable truths some poems ask us to confront, and the early poems—and subsequent rejection letter—that emboldened Simic to find new ways of seeing familiar things.
Simic has released new two books this year. The first, The Life of Images, is a collection of nonfiction prose pieces celebrating the author’s interests and passions: fried sausage, old records, New York City, cultural figures from Emily Dickinson to Buster Keaton. His gift for enlivening the everyday is on display in a new poetry collection, The Lunatic—in the title piece, for instance, a single snowflake hints at the obsessive, Sisyphean nature of madness. Familiar objects and spaces—boyhood roads, empty rooms, main-street shops—prompt feelings of dread and awe.
A former United States poet laureate, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn’t End. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, and spoke to me by phone.

Charles Simic: Like anyone my age, war has always been part of my life. I was born in 1938 and was three years old when the bombs started falling on my hometown of Belgrade. When the city was liberated in October 1944, I was six, living in the center of the city. My parents always being busy with—well, who knows what they were busy with—we kids used to just run in the street. And we saw a lot of stuff. Stuff young children are not supposed to see. Including, you know, dead people.
There is a story told in my family that I remember only vaguely. I came home wearing a trooper’s helmet on my head. This was after the Russians had liberated the city. There was a church nearby where I lived, and I went in the churchyard and inside there were some dead Germans. The helmet had fallen off, kind of to the side. I remember distinctly that I did not look at him in the face—that was too scary. But I took the helmet. The reason the story is repeated in my family is not because of what I did—that I took it off a dead German. More awful things than that happened during the Second World War. They told the story because I got lice from the helmet, and they had to shave my head.
When I first got to the United States, I was 16, and as soon as I arrived people started telling me—“Oh, Charlie, you’re going to Korea!” But I didn’t, of course. I was too young, but there was always that fear. I remember working for the Chicago Sun-Times when I was young—a lowly job, going in in the morning into what was called the composing room, where they put together the paper on Saturday mornings. I was in a pretty good mood because it I’d gotten paid the night before. One of the workers yelled out to me, “Hey, Simic, you’re going to Lebanon!” They were sending Marines there at the time. It scared me—ruined my day. I thought, “I don’t want to go to Lebanon!” On and on, for the rest of my life. I was in the army before Vietnam, then my brother was in Vietnam, and then the first Gulf War and my son thought that he would be in that ...
As you know, we no longer see carnage from our wars. But during the Vietnam War, if you stayed up late at night—which I did in those days, certainly—and turned on the TV around 11 o’ clock or midnight, they would show documentary footage of the war. They were really graphic pictures that are just impossible to forget. Dead Vietnamese. Machine-gunning dead Vietnamese from a helicopter, or our soldiers lying dead or wounded. Vietnam was the last war where you could see those things, and they learned their lesson. This is sort of the context for my interest in this poem.
I don’t read it that often, but every time I read “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” I sort of choke up. I tried to read it to a class this fall and found myself being immensely, immensely moved by it—even though I know the poem very well and knew what was coming.
The Civil War was a big break in Whitman’s poetry. Sometimes, he’d drive you nuts before that with his oh, what a great country we are, marching towards this glorious future!—all that Emersonian optimism. He saw this vision of collective humanity in this country that he really believed in. He expected all good things would happen from this very energetic and attractive people. And then, boom—the war.
In 1862, his brother is wounded, and Whitman goes down to find him. He then becomes a wound dresser, as they used to call them, in the hospitals around Washington, D.C.—helping to attend to the sick and dying. At this point, a tragic note enters his poetry. This is not the same Whitman. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the great Lincoln poem, for instance, there’s no jingoism at all—just tragedy.
“A Sight in Camp” begins with the narrator waking up, leaving his tent, and seeing a row of covered bodies:
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
It’s just so matter-of-fact. There is not an extra word. Everything is completely pared down to the essentials. The whole thing is so understandable, vivid, poignant, troubling. “In the cool, fresh air”: right away, we’re there. We know what it’s like to be there with the “sleepless” narrator, who has seen these kinds of things before. And those shrouding army blankets—that detail is so interesting. Nothing is sticking out—no foot, nothing. Everything is completely covered. We don’t want to lift those blankets.
But Whitman does. There’s a kind of choreography in the poem. One by one, he lifts the blankets to take a peek.
Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;
Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you my dear comrade?
Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
Whitman had compassion. He understood these were unique lives that had been extinguished, three examples among countless others. Empathy is one of the strongest things in Whitman from the very beginning. And as I read this, I really feel sorry for that old man. And of course, for the kid—young guy, who goes to war to be a hero and gets killed. The whole poem is a live wire vibrating with feelings.  It manages to be both restrained and emotional as he speaker uncovers those bodies and looks in horror at their faces.
And then we reach the final, shocking stanza:
Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory; Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
We keep killing Christ, or someone Christ-like, over and over again. It’s a vision of our collective madness. Of course, in Whitman’s time there were a lot of people who read that poem and felt this was blasphemous—the idea of putting Christ there. But this is the power of the poem. I’m not a person who gets teary-eyed reading poetry—other people’s poetry, or my own. But my eyes were moist, and my students looked at me with some discomfort, as I tried to explain it to them what I was feeling.
In a larger sense, there are other blankets we don’t want to lift and see what lies underneath. There is a kind of truth—that’s a big word—that we hate to look at. It could be a face in the street, someone who looks in pain, someone who’s suffering. We turn away—we can’t look at everything. But I like poems that occasionally do that to the reader: make them look.
Whitman was good at that. Being a city person, and a journalist, he was a noticer. He’s always alert, catching these little dramas that other people don’t see. He has a beautiful poem about kids watching a knife-grinder on the street—their eyes growing bigger and bigger as they watch sparks fly.
For the last 42 years, I’ve lived in New Hampshire, in the tiniest little village. Surrounded by woods and mountains—what they call mountains, they are really hills. When I’m in the city, I notice everything. When I’m in the country, I really don’t notice that much. Though I have time on my hands up here, I look—but I may as well be blind. When I was young I never learned about different kinds of trees, different kinds of birds, and on and on. So my abilities to notice are pretty limited in the country. I very often take long walks along small little dirt roads or paths, but I miss much of what goes on.
I guess it has something to do with the fact that I grew up in cities. My imagination is totally connected to the city. If I see a person walking down the street—the way they look—I start speculating what they do or what sort of person they are, about them. In the city, I’m a noticer, happy to spend hours doing nothing but that.
When I wrote my early poems “Knife,” “Fork,” and “Spoon,” in 1964, I lived on 13th St. and University Place [in Manhattan] in a little dump of an apartment. It was summer, and I’d eaten something. I was looking at the table at the knife, the fork, and the spoon. And I noticed, how interesting these three were. I’d stolen one from a greasy spoon, and another from somewhere else. I remember thinking, “Well, Mr. Simic, let’s see if you can write a poem about this.” Because no one had ever written a poem about a fork, or a knife, although we have to use them every day.
So I wrote them, and I sent them to a magazine called The Quarterly Review of Literature. The editor wrote to me and rejected the poems saying “Dear Mr. Simic ... you obviously sound like an intelligent young man.”
Which sort of puzzled me—I thought, “What the fuck does he know?”
He said, “Why do you write poems about these things? Why do you write about such inconsequential things as silverware utensils?”
I came into the library with that letter, feeling both annoyed—I mean, thinking you idiot! Should I write about sunsets in June?—and at the same time I felt triumphant. I thought, well, this is what I’m going to do from now on. This is my thing. I felt I was on the right track. There’s pleasure in that.
To me, the ideal poem is one a person can read and understand on the first level of meaning after one reading. An accessible quality, I think, is important. Give them something to begin with. Something that seems plain and simple but has something strange—something about it that’s not quite ordinary, that will cause them to do repeated readings or to think about it. The ambition is that, each time they read, they will get to another level of the poem. This fearsome little 10- to 15-line poem becomes something like this poem of Whitman’s, which the reader wants to read over and over again.
My fantasy goes like this: a reader, in a bookstore, browsing in the poetry section. They pull out a book and read a few poems. Then they put the book back. Two days later they sit up in bed at four o’ clock in the morning, thinking—I want to read that poem again! Where’s that poem? I’ve got to get that book



DESPAIR

Maybe the turning tables it is
or the insistent throb of my right feet
perchance i should have shot the night crooner
or maimed my twitching brows

patience they say
but how long can we wait
where withering and weathering,
our souls cry from the gates of despair

we have reached down the stairs of desolation
from hence there lies no way further
but the seething cauldron of Hades
her fierce yellow flowers of flame

so i reached for the heavens
from a vantage where angels dread to tread
and willed my soul against the odds of fate
for i believed in what the eyes dread to gaze

till time...
till love...
my despair erodes
and my eyes open once again

                                        DAP

Monday 25 January 2016

A WRITER'S DREAM- COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES


                      THE TEN MILLION DOLLAR DREAM
My feet could not stay still; I leaped so high that I felt like one of the character in a Chinese movie.
In my mind I could still hear the magical words of Mr Ojo as he monotonously droned the life changing words.
“Mr Emmanuel you are the winner of the GLO ten million naira lottery”
I remembered the first thing that crossed my mind was:
“How can he be so calm about ten frigging million, does he say this all the time?”
As I walked down the stair case, my mind went into overdrive with tons of things to do with the money.
Of course there are always the constants like making my family very comfortable. Buying Dad his coveted ford Wagon and opening up a boutique for mum.
‘That should cost me like three million tops’ I calculated
And I would invest a million for my only sibling for her tuition through the university and other necessary funds.
Then the big one: my passion, the big dream that seems slow only because there hasn’t been finance to grease its heavy wheels.
I have always had this crazy idea of setting up a record label for teenage and young gospel artist with a flair for new age songs.
Whenever I get the opportunity to watch viral programs like the voice, American idol, project fame and British got talent, I always think to myself.
Gospel music could use a touch of that
As I thought about it, the picture became clearer to me, probably because the means is now available but I could see clearly the roaring crowd and the new talents unleashing their genius and glorifying God.
I figured out that should cost nothing more than two million naira with the right planning and sponsorship. After all I am not going to start gigantic.
Will it be awesome? Yeah, but definitely not gigantic
That leaves me with about four million.
I was so caught up with planning that I lost consciousness of my environment and didn’t know when I crashed into a young attractive girl about to climb the stairs.
I spewed out a quick apology but got a look of disdain from her in return. She must have accessed my dressing and labeled me a broke dude.
Oh yeah! It’s on for them ladies, ama spill a million grand on clothing and a nice apartment. At least for a start, then ama buy me a nice sporty Camry XLE to keep the groove going.
OH ITS GONNA BE BALLING…
Then the rest which should be within two million will go into publishing my book, opening a book club, setting up a membership site, boosting my blog, taking internet based courses and living the dream.
EVERYTHING SEEMS PERFECT…
Until I heard the sound of the incoming car
By then it was too late.
I was in the middle of the main road.
Quickly before the impact, I woke up from my dream sweating profusely…