Songwriting Without Boundaries (44 page)
Read Songwriting Without Boundaries Online
Authors: Pat Pattison
Leather boots sucking mud
A circling hawk spins in flight
Kicking up the desert dust
Hand trembling, heavy metal
Gleaming, yearning, jealous rage
Pulling hearts, boasting, brawling
Heavy fists swing and sway
Muscles tense and whiskey slow
Fill your mouth with blood and dirt
SARAH BRINDELL
Your fingernails collect the dirt
as each hand pushes further
hoping that with every grab
you’ll find, inside the brown, some yellow
so bright, the sun surrenders
Who cares if this apartment yard’s
been excavated long before
and many kids have searched in vain?
Maybe they all missed a spot …
As dinner permeates the air
You know your time is running short
Just then a glimmer grabs your eye …
Both of these examples use the duple rhythm well. Note that the lines with feminine endings (water, shaking, metal, brawling, further, yellow, surrenders) still retain the duple rhythms.
Your turn.
5 minutes: Pickup Truck
Smell the tires that stripe the asphalt
Smoke and rust and burning oil
Wrists and forearms show the veins
Grip the wheel and fill your bed
Cool black earth in barrow’s heaps
Or gravel shorn from solid rock
Groan beneath the heavy load
Truck that bends it back for you
Sweaty slave in iron chains
Pull the slabs to pyramids
Limping down the empty highway
Wrinkled paint in shades of blue
Coughing motor stops and starts
Headlights squinting through the night
Working in second person can be effective. It allows you to write actively, sometimes using commands instead of statements. And look at the personification in “Truck that bends it back for you” and “Headlights squinting through the night.”
Your turn.
DAY #3
TETRAMETER COUPLETS
A tetrameter couplet is a pair of tetrameter lines that rhyme. Like these:
There’s a wire in my jacket. This is my trade
It only takes a moment, don’t be afraid
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though
Today you’ll add rhyme to the mix. Keep your writing sense-bound, and keep your eyes open for metaphor. If you need help with rhyme, please check out pages 37-43 in
Writing Better Lyrics
and take special note of the effects of rhyme types. For a more complete handling, see my
Essential Guide to Rhyming
.
Here’s a sample from the online writing group:
Avalanche (10 minutes)
It’ll bury you and carry you and pin you to the bottom
You will suffocate in minutes boys so smoke ‘em if you got ‘em
And the weight on your chest is as nothing to the sound
Of the blood in your ears and the mountain crashing down
Oh the avalanche has got you and it will not let you go
You are sucked up in the slipstream of fusilage and snow
You are dancing with the witches in the Mardi Gras parade
Arms akimbo as you limbo in a bloody bone glissade
Oh the avalanche has got you and will secret you away
To the sea beyond the sun where there is no night or day
Where the grass is never green and the peaches never fall
And tomorrow there will be no dawn at all
But the limousines were wrong and the coffins weren’t right
Death is white death is white death is white
Tumbling and tumbling, boulders and rocks
Fallen away from the red mountain top
Dust on the horses, dust on the town
Dust like a ghost cloud swirls all around
Color of blood, the color of pain
Some of these children won’t breathe it again
Crack of the mountain narrow and torn
Safe from the bite of the big winter storms
The risk that you take to be safe from the wind
The risk that you take to be close to your friends
The voice of the mountain still ringing so clear
Thunder at sunrise, the chill rush of fear
Stones hurtle downward, growling and wild
Send them to rest in the valley a while
Roaring down the emerald chutes
Trees on either side salute
The cackle of wind and the cart wheeling rocks
The snow takes the hits, the bumps and the shocks
Screeching with glee, picking up speed
Pigtails of snow, frosty white cheeks
Crumble and rest at the base of the hill
Icicle lungs breathing still
She broke my heart with a white-scented letter
The “we’ll be friends” tag didn’t make me feel better
A postscript as soft as her angora sweaters
And all of the cunning of Las Vegas bettors
Intrusive and cold as a credit card creditor
I bleedin the jaws of a relationship predator
Regretting the day that I ever bedded her
I knew long ago that I should’ve just shedded her
But even back then I knew we had no chance
So I suffocate in thiswhite, three-hole punched, college-ruled paper avalanche