Spontaneous Creativity: The unedited Poetic Stylings of Miz, Nathaniel, Opumie & Eye Kay.

More often than not, social media is used as a platform to engage the senses of users to achieve varied goals, some of which are often entertainment without an intention to impulsive creativity.  I am often this way. So yesterday, I posted a photo on my Whatsapp status with an idea to call for a poetry tag-team to create a poem (

a poetry duet, more like it!) for fun. 

The only rule was this; write lines from a theme suggestive of the image attached. Three people volunteered to spare a minute.  Soonest Iheanyi Nathaniel, EC Opumie, and Eye Kay N chose themes ranging from love, loneliness, and pain.  The results where genius and beautiful, and unedited!                                                                      (1)  A limbic duet By Miz Conquer Soonest I. Nathaniel Miz In the dead of night I lay awake in the musk of a guilt thrusted on me by body counts, of uneven numbers, and hopes buried in limbo. SIN Fibonnaci holds the secret, but how do I say it's you I crave, how do I pray to the God of prime numbers? So I cling to the square roots of memories, love is an equation, there is an ecstasy yet to be proved. Miz You are my ecstasy,  my Eve moment of choice between the apple and snake. You are my knowledge and my woe. My already had and my known. SIN Between two positions, love, please let me relight the candles and circle the grave where we have buried lust with chalk. Let us eat again of that fruit of knowledge and woe, let us raise a temple at the spot of refuge where we hid, our maker will not ask why we have come naked. I come again to your garden alone, defying limits, outsmarting Newton; between promise and fact, pleases etch again your name as a sacred word at the tip of my tongue. (2)  Journey to the sea of rebirth and light A poem by Ec Opumie, Miz Conquer Miz I think of you, lover. Keeper of my lost days and maybe- things. I lay in a sea of cotton softness mimicking the sight and smell of you. Ec 2. Every night I pray our simple love last forever. Miz 3. Forever, for that is what loving you feels like. You are my now and eternity. My present and future and infinity Ec 4. Thoughts of you surround me. You are the beating of my heart. The love you give defines me. My life is no longer dark. Miz 5. Ah! Come to me my love. Let us lay in this sea of white that is us. This purity that joins our rebirth and light Ec 6. Your cuteness knows no bounds, your beauty has no limit, you are the only woman in the world, to which I will commit.  I look at you and gasp in awe, wondering how you are mine and I am yours, you take my breath away my sweetheart, for you, I will walk the line. Ec l love the way you nag and glare. It makes me know how much you care I love the way you walk, just like a man. Not really sexy but it sure is fun. I love you just the way you are. No pretention even from afar. I love you because you love me too Just like the way I do. (3)   The Sea of Loneliness A poem by Miz Conquer Eye Kay N. Miz I lay here in a sea of Cotton creases, like waves through skin, palms forming motions , reaching for a nothing that once was everything Eye kay This bed is much too big for one, and the spaces between my fingers are right where yours used to fit. Miz I lay here in want, a million thoughts foraging for memory of you. Eye Kay They say the worst thing in hell is the knowledge that you missed heaven, so the worst part of being alone is missing you Miz But who needs a heaven when anywhere with you bests the best of heavens and hells my love? My furnace is when you are not here with me. My furnace is when are with me as well Eye Kay A furnace, I burn, consuming what is present, fuelled by what is absent, and the ache I feel is begging for your sweet release Miz Sweet release. In your arms I find the best things. In you, my great love, is  the beauty of an ocean breaking on rocks. Of waterfalls, and of waters between thighs. Eye Kay Like waves, we surge, we urge, we pooled and ebbed, slowed and steadied, and only when the waves break on the rocks do my eyes open and I find. Myself. Alone.

A Memoir Is A Status Update

I just read Dani Shapiro's article on the New yorker titled 'A memoir is not a status update' and I am thinking this writer gives little merit to the social evolution that is the emergence of the impulsive, seldom edited and filtered narrative that updated statuses are made of and how just important they can be to writers and memoirists, if put to good use.
In the article the author bemoans the effects of social media on writing thus;
 '...In an essay on Emily Dickinson, the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry.” We live in a time in which little is concealed, and that pressure valve—the one that every writer is intimate with—rarely has a chance to fill and fill to the point of explosion. Literary memoir is born of this explosion. It is born of the powerful need to craft a story out of the chaos of one’s own history. One of literary memoir’s greatest satisfactions—both for writer and reader—is the slow, deliberate making of a story, of making sense, out of randomness and pain...'' http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/memoir-status-update
This quote from Shapiro's article  is beautiful. I think it is kind of true to some extent too. For some writers,writing is a tortuous, slow process that marinates into something beautiful and complete, a process that is only perfected during a long period of incubation and birth. The very first time I read it,although I liked it, I saw the gaps in her brilliant lines. I think  Emily Dickinson's is sheer perfection and can do no wrong but Adrienne Rich's words do not fully encapsulate the genius that is the social media status-updating writer.

This reminds me of an encounter I had earlier.

Some months back, a Facebook friend and former Alma matter colleague invited me for dinner on her birthday. Our meeting that day was the first time we were ever talking face to face with each other but she knew quite a lot about me. She remembered an ex from Law school. She knew my current relationship, fun facts about my  daughter Merit and so much more. From Facebook statuses and photos, I knew just enough about her as well and the result of our evening together was just fantastic. At the end of our evening out I was thinking, this woman I thought rarely knows me can almost write a short memoir about me and be very correct in her narrative too! I have been told this and after that evening, i realized  some of it is true too. I am a sort valve and I tend to explode all around my friends and followers in some way or the other. I share a lot about some parts of me on Facebook and the other social media outlets that I frequent. Instead of dropping small quotes of sages like some people do, I write long status updates and sometimes blogs about events that I have had. The effect of this is that people get to know me and even form opinions about me, whether they are all positive or negative, I do not know.

From Shapiro's article, It does appear that some people underestimate the effect of the chronicling of events that social media provides but in the years to come, memoirs and books will be written from/about the tweets and updates that people have posted on their statuses. The chronicling of events that social media provides is the stuff that memoirs are made of. Anyone that trivializes this import of their daily spoken words on their pages may just have missed/is missing out on the gold that they are sitting on.

Oh! By the way, did you hear Kim Kadashian is working on a 'book' that only contains selfies of her? I read it will be called 'Selfish' or something. If people are already 'writing books' from impulsive photos taken with their iPhone's,   isn't it possible then that daily status posts of a writer's coinages and thoughts are a waste of writer-ly space?
Think again.
Seriously, wont it be pure genius if you wrote a book with just the status updates from the important moments of your life or those updates that caused the most storm on your timeline? You could title your book 'Status'. Did I just give you the greatest idea ever? Ah! Thank me later. I wont mind receiving an autographed copy when this book comes out though.

:-)

That Rebound Show

In my days (I am *famzing* old woman now), revenge relationships  were handled differently.
We broke up with relationships or marriages, mourned in silence for a while.
Get into another.
The 'most in-you-face-ex'! show off we did then was walk around for days with the new boyfriend hoping for the ex to hear by word of mouth from his friends or family.

Things are different now, thanks to social media.

To get a recent ex jealous for loosing the fabulousity* that is the social media lad these days, he/she gets a new boy toy/ girl toy as soon as the ex thing is official, come on facebook/twitter/Instagram with the photos and the poetry the minute their lips locks, and yes, he/she must tell the world when the next lip-lock-round is coming up too. Write the taunting messages of how this new relationship best they've ever had.
They play out their silliness to the public hoping to get ONE person jealous till it all fades, then, write the obituary of their dead-yet-again relationship with the rebound, for the public to read.
Again.

A good percentage of people that will read this has done this once or twice. I am probably the queen of this as well although I don't remember (now). Forgive me. This brave new world corrupts even the old at heart, like me.

It is hard to see the things we do and analyse just how stupid we look to the rational bystander sometimes ...

But how much of this rebound show is fair to the rebound girl/boy though? How do they feel when they realize they are mere tools in the hands of a probably bitter woman/man out to show off or use him/her as bait to someone else? Do they realize this at all?
Are we being fair to them? To the public we subject to pick through our rot and stink?

Social Safety

It helps to be physically guarded/security concious with people u interact with over a social media website. A girl was allegedly murdered by her Facebook pals in Lagos Months ago.
When people you do not physically know but are social media 'pals' with you  write on my wall/inbox and tell you to go meet them or ask for your address, that they want to meet you, try to be civil but decline such offers. The thing is, there are  perverts and good people around these days. If you must meet someone you do not know, meet them in public places, be accompanied by someone else, inform a family member or friend first and let the person u are meeting know that others know you are meeting him/her! Take/save his/her picture and send it to a friend or family member,update your status with him/her in it.
There are perverts out there these days looking for people they can drag into their nests. Take adequate security measures with people you do not know.