The illiterate

Drunk and lying outside on the lawn
Dave, the moon manHe'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 moonAll 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 betweenNothing to hold onto and yet somehow
Someone had managed to get there
Someone had managed to do that
A truly impossible thingSo 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 withIt 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 manBut sober and playing around on the Internet
He started to find bits and pieces
Dave, the moon manThings 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 booksFirst 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 learnedGoing '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 turnThe 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 radiationHe 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 afterwardsThen 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 lightingAnd there was something about
The photograph of the footprint too
[Incomprehensible] could leave such
A deep impression on the surface of the moonThen 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 picturesThere 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 moonI thought he had a mission
Dave, the moon man
To prove to everyone that no one
Had ever landed on the moonBut 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 wrongAnd 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 doneLying out on the lawn at night
Drunk, with the dew soaking
Through the back of your jacket
And all that distance between here and thereAnd 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 cardboardHe really wanted to believe
That they'd managed to get it there
Just by strapping enough fuel onEven though today
You probably wouldn't trust it
To get you down the shopsDave, the moon man
Dave, the moon man