Writing exercise

Experiencing the awfulness of writing block and am on a hideously over-extended deadline. As usual it's because this article means something to me and could be good, even great. So I tried a writing exercise to help loosen that damnable stuttering and hesitant mental tongue. Came out better than I expected- I could almost feel the father's tears. Heck I nearly cried myself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Google directed me to the following exercise: The T.S. Eliot/John Gardner Killer Exercise.

Here is how it was written up on this site.

"This exercise is quite possibly the most difficult, demanding and important exercise a writer can ever do. The poet and critic, T. S. Eliot, coined the phrase "objective correlative" to designate what he believed was the most important element in writing: Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed WITHOUT ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

The late John Gardner, recognised in his lifetime as the leading creative writing teacher in the United States, developed the following exercise for students:

A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man's point of view WITHOUT telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 250 word description."

Here is my fifteen minute attempt:

Mohamed slumped down on the hard pole that served as a bench at the Sea Point bus stop. Never a soft place to rest, never a break in this God-forsaken country. There was a woman with a crying baby next to him and the sound of it grated against his nerves till he felt raw and numb at the same time. In Somalia this wouldn't have happened. This woman in her brazen skirt. The child, crying.

"Will Smith is Switch!" a scratched poster next to him declared. Switch. From Zero to hero. From nothing to everything and back again. Heroes and wars and rescued heroines. Happily ever after and the bloody collateral that gets left in their bloody wake. He couldn't see the poster any more and he realised it was because of the tears and suddenly the lump in his throat was real, too fucking real. And he never swore, he was a mild man, a mild man, he tried to say to the woman next to him who had turned away and he was glad because the child, the child's voice was hoarse now and it was crying as if it's heart would break. As if everything it knew was a filthy lie and the only life that was worth living was not this one. Anything but this one.