Lyrics

Recently I have been revisiting pages and pages of lyrics written by a younger self.
Most of them are quite atrocious.  Laughable actually, the attempts being made to pay attention to rhythm in such arbitrary ways.  I paid little attention to meaning back then, preferring simply to look for clever self-recursive little rhymes and think it was clever.

But today, I think a lot about the meanings of words. With an opera to be pondered, I am thinking even more about that.  What the hell kind of a story is this going to be?  I'm mostly decided on a scene with  a trio with a man and two women in some kind of ritual of "preparation".  I imagine them going through their personal/private preparation to get ready for performance of a more public ritual that is big-mojo-juju for all involved.

Ritual also makes me think of fetishes.  Not the kind that you are thinking of, no.  I think of a fetish in the anthropological sense, more of a ritual object that is for use because of its supposed power.  The knife of a great long-dead warrior perhaps, or the skull of a vanquished enemy, or the skull of a powerful animal, etc.

What sorts of fetishes to you keep?