Drunk and lying outside on the lawn
Dave, the moon man
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