Object Writing

For the past few weeks, I've been waking in the mornings and working on an exercise known as "object writing."  I start with an image in mind, and write whatever comes to mind for ten solid minutes.  When my alarm goes off, I stop writing. The point of this is to unlock sense-memories that I can use in my songwriting.  I've actually found some of these to be pretty entertaining, so I'm going to start posting them occasionally on this blog.  Hope you'll enjoy.

LEAF

Golden-yellow and extremely brittle.  That is my memory of the giant magnolia leaves in the fall of my youth. They lay strewn about our entire front yard on cool autumn days.  Dad and I would go out and rake them up - well, Dad would rake.  I would mostly wait until he'd built a huge pile of them and then ceremoniously dive in to the pile.  There it was - maybe two feet high...brown, orange, gold - all the colors of autumn's pallet, and in a grand multitude of shades.  It was perfect, round, undisturbed - an island of leaves in a sea of yellow-green grass.  The lawn was then pristine with the only blemish coming in the form of the few leaf piles.  That's when I entered, as a tornado, or a missile, or giant alien - whatever destructive force I picked that day.  I plunged myself in the center of a pile, and blew the leaves out in every direction.  I heard and felt them crackle and crunch beneath me - the ones that did not escape back into the yard.  Naturally, I would climb to my feet laughing with glee, and my Dad would shake his head, and return to the duty of tidying the pile.  As I stood amid the pile, I could feel the wetness of the lower layers settle into my shoes and even begin to creep up the legs of my jeans.  Bits and pieces of broken leaves slipped down into my shoes and poked at my feet through my socks.  Still, I was a boy and I couldn't be deterred by minor discomfort or inconvenience.  I would simply step out of the pile and take aim at the next one.

- Dukes