Dave The Moon Man - Looper

He’d look up at the blurred stars

As the dew on the grass

Soaked through the back of his jacket

And the back of his trousers

And then he’d look towards the moon

All that distance from the surface

He was pinned down on

To the surface glowing in the darkness

With nothing but space all the way in between

Nothing to hold onto and yet somehow

Someone had managed to get there

Someone had managed to do that

A truly impossible thing

So he’d get up out of the grass

Light hearted again

It made everything else possible

Anything you could think of

Anything you were stuck with

It could be done because that had been done

Someone had got up and gone to the moon

And nothing else was more impossible than that

Dave, the moon man

But sober and playing around on the Internet

He started to find bits and pieces

Dave, the moon man

Things about the Van-Allen Belt

And about Kodak film and dual light sources

And he talked to people who knew about similar stuff

And he read bits in magazines and books

First time I met him was at a party

He was surrounded by a group of people

And he was giving short lectures

About all the stuff he had learned

Going 'round the party one group at a time

With all the energy of someone newly born to a religion

You had to wait your turn

If you wanted him to tell you about it

So I waited my turn

The first thing was the Van Allen Belt

He said, an outer layer of the atmosphere

That all the shuttle flights stay inside

That protects the earth from radiation

He read somewhere that if the astronauts

Had really gone beyond that

And gone all the way to the moon

The radiation would have killed them soon afterwards

Then there were the photographs

Of astronauts walking on the moon

He said you could tell from the shadows

That the light sources were all wrong

Which suggested studio lighting

And there was something about

The photograph of the footprint too

could leave such

A deep impression on the surface of the moon

Then the thrust of the rocket when it was landing

Should have forced two big mounds

Up on either side of the rocket

But there are none in the pictures

There was a whole load of stuff

A whole load of stuff more than that

And so he was coming to believe it was a hoax

And that no one had ever been to the moon

I thought he had a mission

Dave, the moon man

To prove to everyone that no one

Had ever landed on the moon

But that wasn’t it at all, he was telling everyone

All this stuff he’d learned 'cause he hoped that

Someone could prove to him it was wrong

And it wasn’t just a hoax

Because dreaming was so much harder otherwise

And it was so much harder to find the belief

To get things done

Lying out on the lawn at night

Drunk, with the dew soaking

Through the back of your jacket

And all that distance between here and there

And he really wanted to believe

That people had traveled to the moon

In that crazy rocket

That looked as if it was made

Out of tin foil and cardboard

He really wanted to believe

That they’d managed to get it there

Just by strapping enough fuel on

Even though today

You probably wouldn’t trust it

To get you down the shops

Dave, the moon man

Dave, the moon man