Pink

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.

It's almost always raining, drizzling, misting, slightly, lightly, heavily, but almost always dripping.

The kitchen faucet marking time.

Camera pans across it through washed out black and white tin tech.

Across the back, the color a saturated smear;

lighting directors guiding highlights all the time.

The priest is scratchy and smells mildewy...

too much rain.

Stomach's empty... the fridge is a booming echo chamber.

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.

Zoom to feet descending, descending, frames skipping and jumping in vertical crash scratching.

The hallway to street sub-lit in shadow, casting rotting thick as broken glass shards, and the reflections sparkle in the rain-speckled sidewalk.

It's always raining.

But that's the way the film runs.

The scenes seem clear, but the final print is always too grainy or scratched...

blurs the longer you watch it and finally just falls away to clips and snapshots of its former glory.

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.

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.