This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
You see him creeping around the church
For a year he's been alone
Sorrow took all his senses away
Every night he sleeps beside her grave
There by the bells there is a stone
I'm the only one who can read it
And on the fence is the red rooster
Who once had been in your heart
Fear driven on this fence
I go digging every night
To see what remained
From the face that smiled for me
There by the bells I'm spending the night
There among snails a lonely animal
During the day I run after the night
You escape me for the second time
Marry me
I'm digging deep with my hands
To find what I missed so much
And the moon in its most beautiful dress
I've kissed your cold lips
I embrace you tenderly
But your skin tears off like paper
And parts are falling off of you
You escape me for the second time
There by the bells I'm spend the night
There amongs snails a lonely animal
During the day I run after the night
You escape me a second time
Marry me
So I take what remained of you
The night is hot and we are stripped
To curse the rooster who greets the morning
I have his head hacked off
For a year he's been alone
Sorrow took all his senses away
Every night he sleeps beside her grave
There by the bells there is a stone
I'm the only one who can read it
And on the fence is the red rooster
Who once had been in your heart
Fear driven on this fence
I go digging every night
To see what remained
From the face that smiled for me
There by the bells I'm spending the night
There among snails a lonely animal
During the day I run after the night
You escape me for the second time
Marry me
I'm digging deep with my hands
To find what I missed so much
And the moon in its most beautiful dress
I've kissed your cold lips
I embrace you tenderly
But your skin tears off like paper
And parts are falling off of you
You escape me for the second time
There by the bells I'm spend the night
There amongs snails a lonely animal
During the day I run after the night
You escape me a second time
Marry me
So I take what remained of you
The night is hot and we are stripped
To curse the rooster who greets the morning
I have his head hacked off
Lyrics submitted by John M
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This song is classic old school German Romanticism, the kind of extreme Germanic weirdness that spawned the English Gothic movement and made Shelley, Byron and Poe mad with joy. You can also see it in Joerg Buttgereit's insanely wonderful "Nekromantic" films, which feature the same neo-Gothic fusion of sex, death and criminal psychopathology.
The only element in the story told by these lyrics I'm not sure about is the rooster (or as an American might say, a cock, which is also rude slang for a penis.) Is the man in the song emasculating himself? Or is he carrying out a voodoo-style magic ritual by sacrificing a rooster? Probably not, because the rest of the song is so clear and literal. He just killed the rooster who he blames for bringing on the dawn, because night is the only time he can be with his rotting girlfriend.