The Faces

Lyrics

[Intro]
(nothing at all — then the sense of being looked at)
There's a face. Fully formed. Absolutely fully formed.

[Verse 1]
Not someone you know. That's the first thing people say.
A stranger, in high detail — pores, eyelashes, the lot —
photographic, still, and facing you directly,
in a darkness with no light in it and nothing to reflect.
And then it becomes another face. And then another one.
None of whom exist. None of whom have ever existed.

[Chorus]
The faces. They arrive by the dozen, one by one.
Ordinary strangers with completely ordinary heads,
looking at you, or past you, or through you, or away,
changing every second or two, at no request of yours.
The faces. The most-reported image there is.
Everybody's dark is full of people nobody has met.

[Verse 2]
There's a region of the brain that does only this — only faces,
so specialised that damage to it takes faces alone
and leaves the rest of seeing perfectly intact.
An entire district, dedicated, and idle at this hour,
and idling, apparently, means generating the stock:
face after face after face, all night, for nobody.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Some of them are unpleasant. That's worth saying plainly.
Some are grotesque, or grinning, or too close, or wrong,
and the literature is full of people rather shaken by it,
and if that is yours, it is common, and it is not about you —
it is a face factory running with the lights off,
and the quality control is asleep, because you are.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the sense of being looked at, ending)
Gone.
Nobody. Nobody at all.