Atlantis

Your entire body shakes when you laugh.
As if your sense of humor was built on a fault line,
And the coast of your heart falls into the ocean of yourself,
And I am left looking for this Atlantis.

Left looking for this place that exists in stories told by old men
Who were there when mathematics assured them,
Their willingness to believe was greater than their determination to dismiss.
I am left looking for Atlantis.
Regardless of the scientists that insist my efforts would be better-spent unearthing clues to where the wild things went.


Dry as it might, faith can’t put a dent in fact.
So we must settle for watching science reenact the world.
As if the universe was curled around this globe.
And if we consider that the universe is never ending,
Then we are not even a microbe.
We’re like a death threat from a pacifist.
We’re nothing.


But the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that nothing is fo shizzle.
And the interesting thing about that is
It ensures the principle itself can’t even be a fact.
But we still act as if this time we can see the forest for the trees.
Regardless of the soft wood lumber levy
We fall in line like reforest pine
It’s all straight rows,
Where everything grows a little less wild
And a little more humdrum, ho hum.
We come from a mentality that rarely sees the horror in symmetry,
Or the beauty in non-conformity.


We insist that for us everything must be clear-cut.
But what about philosophy?
What about the tree that fell in the forest that no one was around to hear?
It is a little less clear and a little more deep,
Deep like if Oprah Winfrey farts in a bathtub
And no bubbles come to the surface,
Is there an alternate universe where the price of gas is cheap?
It’s possible,
But we can’t prove it.
Anymore than we can prove that light can move fast enough to stop a monster
Hiding in the closet.
We deposit our faith in fear,
But we clear our minds to the possibility that
Maybe we as adults secretly sometimes still get scared of the dark,
Things that go bump in the night.


And I can’t prove that I have ever loved anyone.
But despite the smoking and the over weight body,
I want to grow old with you.
Go through muscle and joint pains,
To the point that every time it rains,
We can feel it in our knees.
Get arthritis so bad that every time we move,
We sound like two bowls of rice crispies.
We'll snap, kracle and pop.
But we still take the time to stop and take the time.
I am looking for Atlantis.


Letting faith turn this fiction into fact.
As if I have tracked this missing continent for decades.
And all I know so far is that it is somewhere under water.
I am looking for clues in those blurry photos of U.F.O.’s
And thinking “if aliens are so smart then
Why don’t they start making their spaceships look like airplanes?”
That way we would just point to the sky and say
“An airplane in a common place
and not at all suspect”


We are all shipwrecked on this idea that everything has to be explained.
But maybe we just need to believe that
Lemmings jump off of cliffs to prove that they love us.
And sure that sacrifice is as empty as the box of condoms
Politicians used when they thought they could fuck us.
But it’s nice to believe that somebody up there cares enough to plummet onto jagged backbreaking rocks in an attempt to tell us we’re beautiful.
Tell us that as far as life goes,
Our fingerprints are like snowflakes.
We leave them on everything.
But they melt in the time it takes to touch someones tongue.
But if we’re lucky
Maybe we’re a member along with the sunken cities of a lost continent.


This is for each child who is a monument to the ones who came before
Maybe the best we can hope for,
Is that those we leave behind find comfort in,
Knowing they we were born out of love and not science.
But biology explains the how, but love explains the why.


So in the event of our deaths we hereby bequeath all of these words to you
And they are only meant to say that uncertainty is something that everyone goes through,
And there is not much in the way of proof, but believe me we loved you.
We held our breath for your first step, your first word, we laughed when it finally occurred to you lemons are sour.


This is for every time love become the finest minute in the darkest hour
This is for those who scour the streets wondering where the wild things went,
For the believers who lent us their madness.
This is for everyone we miss.
And this is for the children who are lost.


Sadness is nothing more than the cost of being able to smile once in a while
And grief is the trial we stand to offer evidence
That your fingerprints were left on our hearts and our skin
And in terms of proof, love can be demonstrated in giving.
Our lives consist of the effort we give in swimming towards the lost continent,
Where you are rumored to be living.


-Shane Koyczan