Crewe's Song

You’ve got to judge the empty spaces
Before you slip between their sights.
Chattel sometimes feel you coming.
They sense the breath before the bite.
So if you need a valid reason,
Keep in mind the need to feed.
Something always has to suffer.
Something always has to bleed.
Rise up!
Take hold!
White heat!
Take souls!
Those are lyrics for a new song. It’s been playing on a maddening loop in my heard for the past three or four days. Right now it doesn’t have a title, but I’m calling it “Crewe’s Song”, because that’s what it is. If you don’t know (and you probably don’t), Crewe is the central character in a book I’m writing. He’s a vampire, and he’s nothing like Lestat or Dracula, much less any of these newly popular pasty teenagers (Twilight, anyone?) for whom blood-sucking is a metaphor for sexuality and not draining the girl you hunger for is a metaphor for abstinence.
Crewe definitely gets his freak on. But he doesn’t drink blood. Doesn’t need to. In fact, everything you thought you knew about vampires is wrong. Especially the parts about liking black clothing and bad haircuts. In fact, if you passed one on the street, you wouldn’t know it. And that’s just the way they like it.
I’ve blocked out the Crewe novel and had started working on it almost exclusively, when I got waylaid by the necessities job hunting. However much I’d like to crawl into a corner room somewhere and not come out until Crewe is finished, I’ve grown rather fond of eating and having air conditioning. So for the moment Crewe is on hold. Technically speaking, anyway. Both the book and the music are still writing themselves in my head.
I just hope one day I have the time and the means to get it all fixed in a form the real world can experience. It does no one any good in my head. Well, except for keeping me endlessly entertained. There is something deliciously demented about standing in a line at the supermarket humming the rhythm of one of your songs and getting stern looks from people who think you’re insane when you start mumbling the lyrics under your breath. Does that constitute hearing music that only I can hear? And is it okay as long as it’s music, and not voices?
Anyway. Crewe is still tormenting me. These lyrics fell into my lap just as I was about to go to bed. I thought maybe I’d jot them down somewhere so I wouldn’t forget them. This is as good a place as any.