I wrote this poem in 2011 while attending school near a former asylum. I was talking a Psychology course and we talked about the ways Nostalgia has been defined over the past few hundred years. This is a poem about that.

A cerebro-neurological disorder caused by the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressions, ideas, and traces, of the Fatherland still cling.

1688.

Sharp “atmospheric pressure differences, blood migrates from the heart to the brain, afflicting the observed with sentiment.

1732.

Indigenous to the Alpines, unremitting clanging of cowbells destroys the eardrum and brain cells.

Too much cowbell.

Anxiety.

Sadness.

Weakness.

Loss of Appetite.

Insomnia.

Fear.

Obsessive Homesickness.

Intense unhappiness.

Immigrant psychosis for the soldiers, seamen, immigrants, and first year college students.

I the protagonist.

Featuring them.

A way to cope with the present.