Blood Behind Your Ear

Listening to Electric Six - Danger! High Voltage

Editing your work is important. This never really connected with me fully until last week on Sunday night. In my creative writing class a few of us have started up a "write club" for reading our stuff and giving and recieving constructive criticism. I read out some stuff that was totally freewritten and unedited and I got a lot of great ideas for it, but I realized how much better my stuff would be if I actually bothered to edit it. That's not to say that I don't (I do), but I'm not guerilla enough in my approach, I get too attached to what I write that I have a hard time changing it. I did this great freewrite about this actual person wandering around Surrey central station a while back so I decided to take all the constructive criticism on it from the first "write club" meeting, and get medieval with it. This is after editing.

Listening to Cold War Kids - Hang Me Up To Dry

Blood Behind Your Ear
You, middle aged man, wander through the bus stop crowd, cry Lucy with your head upturned. The pavement is your friend, it is your only friend. Cause Lucy is out there in the city, in a hotel room, on the floor, on a binge, with a snot slide burning at her cheek in fevered convulsion. In her eyes is infinity, the hotel bedside and the universe of stars and planets collide like her coke and LSD. But out here you wear down the rocks, caked blood behind your ear from when she left, two days ago, but you still call out her name. Throat bare and raw, chimes cut from a string, windtunnel backporch, untuned, unhinged, in love, in the city, waiting. You wonder was it drugs or a pusher brought her out and down? Or was it just running away? The blood behind your ear, testament to a bathroom fight with pillbottles and a razor. And you know it could be yours or hers, neither one of you is sure. So I look up to you, looking up as you walk by. You, middle aged man, keep calling her name. She's lost to the rest of suburbia, but you've left that world behind. You belong in the gutter and the motel room where she lies in waiting, not knowing. Mistress of mud, and you, middle aged man, will become the mud for her.


park ranger