Glass Cathedral

Train pulls in.
Quarter past eleven, the carriage holds a quiet kind of light
Fifty faces blooming pale blue
Fifty gardens nobody is tending tonight
A mother on the platform — just out of reach
A daughter tugging softly on her sleeve
Asking something gentle
No screen could ever answer
Something only skin can really receive

We built a glass cathedral
And forgot we had a sky
Come back
Come back
Come back

Look up, look up
The room is here, the room is now
Look up, look up
The world is close, the world is loud
We were never meant
To watch our lives go by

Oh-oh, look up tonight
Oh-oh, look up tonight

Front row.
The band is burning holy
Smoke and sweat and forty thousand watts of grace
But the lighters — they went quiet years ago
Every flame a camera now
Every face behind a case
Watching through a window
Through a window
Through the window of a screen
Forty thousand bodies in the same exact room
And somehow
None of us are there

We built a glass cathedral
And forgot we had a sky
Come back
Come back
Come back

Look up, look up
The room is here, the room is now
Look up, look up
The world is close, the world is loud
We were never meant
To watch our lives go by

Oh-oh, look up tonight
Oh-oh, look up tonight

The bus stop holds us softly
A row of pale devotion
Every soldier in formation tilted gently toward the glow
And I —
I am one of them
My thumb moves like a prayer wheel
I forgot I was spinning
A little holy habit
I forgot
I let it grow

We are ghosts that learned to haunt ourselves through six-inch panes of glass
An audience to the moment we are standing in
A moment we keep meaning to return to
But it's already
Going
Past

Look up, look up
The room is here, the room is now
Look up, look up
The world is close, the world is loud
We were never meant
To watch our lives go by

Look up tonight
Look up tonight
We were never meant
To watch our lives go by