[Verse 1]

Darkness

And a scratching, whirring noise

Darkness

And then, slowly, the pictures

Shudder up in sight

A building string of images like silvery bubbles

Surfacing from the deep

[Verse 2]

It's almost always raining

Drizzling, misting

Slightly, lightly, heavily

But almost always dripping

The kitchen faucet marking time

[Verse 3]

Camera pans across it

The washed out black and white

Tintack

Across the back, the color a saturated smear

The Lighting Director's guiding the highlights all the time

[Verse 4]

The priest is scratchy

And smells mildewy

Too much rain

Stomach's empty

The fridge is a booming echo chamber

[Verse 5]

They edit in stock horror darkening footage

Of starvation, atrocities, Vietnam war footage

Descending through it

The crackling of outtake sections

Litter the stairwell, serpentine and yet brittle

A close crop

[Verse 6]

Zoom to feet descending, descending

Frames skipping and jumping in vertical crash scratching

The hallway to street sub-lit in shadow

Casting long and thick

As broken glass shards

And the reflections sparkle

In the rain-speckled sidewalk

It's always raining

[Verse 7]

But that's the way this film runs

The scenes seem clear

But the final print is always too grainy and scratched

Blurs the longer you watch it and finally

Just falls away to clips and snapshots of its former glory

[Verse 8]

Loop that frames the whole world outside

Often running in slow motion

Perhaps the projectionist has nodded off in a stupor during the last showing

His elbow hitting a switch

And for a second or a week, the world runs in reverse

The images all silent, filmed and jerking nervously back across the streets

Seems like the reel is always running backwards

Time is fiction

[Outro]

Time is fiction

So, why don't you come lay down with me

In this pitch-bending film-loop

And let the acid rain beat down on our bodies