Pink - Chemlab

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-tack

Across the dark, the color a saturated smear;

The Lighting Director’s guiding

The highlights all the time

The print 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 this 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