Shane Koyczan, The Short Story Long - Atlantis lyrics

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'm left looking for Atlantis

Left looking for this place
That exists in the stories told by old men
Who were there when mathematics assured them
Their willingness to believe
Was greater than their
Determination to dismiss
I'm left looking for Atlantis

Regardless of the scientist that insists
My efforts would be better spent
Unearthing clues to where the
Wild things went

Try as it might


Faith can't put a dent in fact
So we must settle for watching
Science re-enact the world
As if the universe was
Curled around this globe

And if we consider that the
Universe is never ending
Then we're 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 that it ensures that the principle
It'self can't even be a fact

But we still act as if this time can see the
Forest through the trees
Regardless of the soft wood lumber levies
We fall in line like reforested pine

It's all straight rows
Where everything grows a little less wild
A little more humdrum, ho, hum
We come from the 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's a little less clear, 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?

Possible, but we can't prove it
Any more 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 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've ever loved anyone
But despite the smoking
And the overweight 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 Krispies

We're all "Snap, Crackle and Pop"
But we still take the time to stop
And take the time i'm looking for Atlantis

Letting faith turn this fiction into fact
As if I tracked this
Missing continent for decades
And all I know so far
Is that it is somewhere under water

I'm looking for clues in the
Most blurry photos of UFOs and thinking
If alien are so smart
Then why don't they start making
Their spaceships look like airplanes?
That way we'd just point to the sky and say:
"An airplane
How common place and not at all suspect"

We're all shipwrecked on this idea
That everything has to be explained
But maybe we just need to believe
That lemmings jump off cliffs to
Prove that they love us

And sure, that sacrifice is as empty as
The box of condoms
That politicians used when they thought
They could fuck us but it is nice to believe
That somebody up there
Cares enough to plummet onto jagged
Back-breaking rocks
In an attempt to tells 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 someone's tongue

But, if we're lucky, maybe we're remembered
Along with the sunken cities
Of a lost continent

This is for each child
Who is a monument to the
One's who came before
Maybe the best we can hope for
Is that those we leave behind
Find comfort in knowing
That we're born out of love, and not science

That 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 everyone
Goes through
And there is not much in the way of proof
But believe me, we loved you

We held our breaths for your first step
Your first word
We laughed when it finally occurred to you
Lemons are sour

This is for every time
Love becomes the finest minute
And the darkest hour
This if for those who scour the streets
Wondering where the wild things went
For the believers who leant us their madness
This is for everyone we miss

And this is for the children who were lost
Sadness is nothing more than the cost
Of being able to smile once in awhile
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 efforts we give
In swimming towards the lost continent
Where you are rumoured to be living