Dedicated to Gabe Marx
lyrics
I. Agnostalgia


They say you can never go home again
But you're youngbravestupidsmart enough to ask whether

Maybe you can, after all, go to your home-away-from-home again

From the onset, manicpanic sets in

You're yelling, laughing, sweating, running,
Lifting up unfamiliar children to the sun


You feel guilty, looking as you do unragged, unworn
Clean, fresh and well-slept
You bruise your face contorting it in a way you suddenly recognize seeing your who life

On the faces of those who Returned
The face conveys a wide gamut of emotion
Relief wrapped in regret, covered with joy, tempered with unfamiliarity

You don't know if you miss it or not
Agnostalgia creeps in


From your vantage point overlooking the valley
You start to notice a paradox
You can see the perimeter, can see with captioned labels the names of each component

You know its underlying mechanics are simple and few and well-documented
The roads are 1:72 scale
The people are much tinier than when you lived there

You now know it's nothing but a scale model
Of Middle School
Of Government

Of Society at large
Your vantage point insists that this place is so small


And yet, here you are swimming in it
Seeing it stretch out to the horizon with no end in sight
Inside it, a multiverse of swirling storylines

Infinitely interchangeable socio-pycho-sexual relationships
In every conceivable combination
You are nearly drowning in it and you go with the flow because it's just so easy

And you are separate from it forever and also a part of it always

You watch children at play

And your perspectives spirals outward beyond your control
And like a painting of a painting of a painter painting a landscape
You realize that one of them

Doesn't just remind you of you
He is you
And you remember that you started out as someone taller than you

And you suppose he must have started out as someone taller than him
And that it must stretch further back with each previous generation remaining forever taller
In the minds of its descendents

Which would necessarily dictate an uppermost echelon of progenitors of your youness
Who would have to be as big as galaxies
And yet, they are trapped inside this bubble in the same way a part of you will always be trapped there


And you look at the outside
And you know like the back of your heart what's inside and you think:

How can this tiny bubble hold?



II. Dislocation

When you return from any trip, but most notably a longer stay,

And you come back Home
You get that feeling that everything was moved
Just a little bit

And things are the wrong color or the wrong relative size
The air smells funny


All the while, of course, everything feels exactly the same

You have obviously always known this fact from the first time you strangely found

Your toys exactly how you left them in media res
But somehow ever so slightly askew
Like they had all gotten up and moved around while you were gone

And were just really good at remembering where you left them

The thing is, the new thing is, the strange things is
You always pegged the Ennui of the Return
As a natural by-product of leaving a superior location to return to your creature comforts


Sure you were happy to have YOUR stuff back (you love your stuff)
It's just that things were bettersimplerfasterslower way back
Before
In Grassisgreenerville


What's new what's strange is to discover
This feeling of Dislocation accompanies any return
No matter how much you need to get home
It won't be the home in your head

And getting back won't make it that place
Because you can't go Home again


III. Appreciation Buzz


Take that buzz
The Appreciation Buzz that comes to you unbidden
While you open your heart's ears or point it's one piercing eye
At something you just can't help but love unabashedly
The Appreciation Buzz does not ignore flaws

It celebrates them or simply lets them be
Telling you with raised arm hair or bodily tingling
That this thing before you is Good

You take that buzz and you turn it on yourself
And you think about the surprisingly unscientific storage capacity of small bubbles
And you think about you

And how maybe you hold galaxies too
And how maybe we made God and the Stars made us
And how you are special just like everyone else
Because everyone else is made from the same stuff you are

You start to wonder if maybe since we all, everything in creation,
Come from the same thing, we could all in the end happily return to it

But you can't go home again