The Drop

Lyrics

[Intro]
(everything soft and settled — and then the entire band hits at once)
STAIRS. There were STAIRS.

[Verse 1]
You were gone. You were properly gone. You were nearly all the way down.
And the last thing on the way out was a step that wasn't there —
a kerb, a stair, a gap, the ground arriving late —
and your whole body fired at once to catch a fall you were not in.
Your leg kicked. Your arms went out. You said something out loud.
And you are wide awake, at speed, with your heart going.

[Chorus]
The hypnic jerk! The myoclonic twitch! The start!
Seventy percent of people. Most nights. Perfectly normal.
The body reads the muscles letting go as falling,
and it is not wrong exactly — letting go IS falling —
and it catches you. It catches you every time.
It has caught you every night of your entire life.

[Verse 2]
And you have to start again now. That's the actual cost.
The twenty minutes you'd already spent are simply gone,
you are back at the top of it, wide-eyed, mildly annoyed,
resenting your own nervous system for looking after you.
Thank you, you say to nobody. Thanks. Thanks very much.
Nothing was falling. Nothing has ever been falling.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There's a theory it's ancestral — a primate in a tree,
the grip releasing, the branch, the necessary snatch —
and I have no idea whether that's true, and I like it anyway,
because it means the thing that wakes you is a very old friend
doing a job it has done for several million years,
badly, in a bed, on the ground floor, where nothing can fall.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the band stops dead — silence — a long breath)
Right.
From the beginning, then.