Keego Harbor by Matthew Milia

Someday I think I’ll move back to Keego Harbor
Rent an upstairs room where the pear trees bloom for the barber
That I used to see
Since the age of three
In Keego Harbor

My parents met in a bar in Keego Harbor
And the video store isn’t there anymore by the water
Of Dollar Lake
Where there’s so much at stake
In Keego Harbor

Maybe I would get a shift
Working at that all-night gift shop at the hospital
Where the brink of luxury
Meets the stink of drudgery
I’ll find a place where it’s all possible
In Keego Harbor it’s all possible

In the first part of life you just let in the light
And you loop it like a DVD menu
And some day in your 30s all your colors lose their bite
And you can’t change the channel now, can you?

So you just re-sign the lease in perpetuity
You can do your grocery shopping in a blindfold with acuity
And you still feel the magic in the parking lot at dusk
Though it’s getting kind of hard to say
What year it is

But I kept the sacred place safe inside of me
I kept it safe through all the foreign things I tried to be
Like the robin’s nest nestled in the letter C
In the mini-mall sign for Nail City

Where Orchard Lake bends and the trailer park ends
And your affluent friend’s dad had offices
Where no one else could know the esoteric way to glow
With the late fall chemical processes

And our uncles, they were all in their mid-thirties once
They’d drop by to check our height charts every couple months
We slowly outgrew everything that we knew
Till we stood inside a world that looked so odd to us

Keego Harbor waits for me
The inland lakes and rusting phone lines lead
To disintegrating subdivisions
Where your parents wait out winter
At the center of your little world
The world is falling all to pieces
June implodes and then releases
Sports arenas from our childhoods

Someday I think I’ll move back to Keego Harbor
Rent an upstairs room where the pear trees bloom for the barber
Though they smell like death
It’s the sweetest breath
In Keego Harbor

Someday I think I’ll move back to Keego Harbor
‘Cause keeping alive’s hard
But giving up’s even harder
And I’m not ready to die
I’ll just go simplify
In Keego Harbor

Appears on Keego Harbor