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There’s a scene in Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s 1995 movie about young romantics exploring Vienna on a whim together, in which Ethan Hawke’s character Jesse recites part of a poem to Julie Delpy’s Celine. The poem is W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” but Jesse imitates two verses from a version he owns, which is a live performance by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. It’s (knowingly) pretentious and romantic and beautiful—Celine lying in Jesse’s arms in the empty early morning as their single night together draws to an end, the poem unfolding first in the space between them, and then the barren city that surrounds them:

All the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

It could, in some parallel dimension, be a Tom Waits song. After all, Jesse’s impression of Auden isn’t too far off from Waits’ distinctive growl, and the poem’s subject matter—the running down of the clock and the mortality that we all face as humans—crops up often in Waits’ songs through the wounded (anti-)heroes they’re home to, who proudly prowl the underbelly of society. In fact, listening to Tom Waits—especially the three ’80s records (1983’s Swordfishtrombones, 1985’s Rain Dogs, and 1987’s Franks Wild Years) that have just been reissued—you’re drawn deep into the lives of the characters that populate the world he creates, many of whom are succumbing—as we all are—to the whims of time, their lives fading like their dreams, their hopes.