Me and My Sweetheart by Matthew Milia

Small donations
From alumni this fall
Should cover the celebrations
In some suburban banquet hall

As Lions traffic
Darting north at dusk
They leave town lickety-split
While you and me
Pass every SUV
And head back into the thick of it

Nobody acts like they know it
I can’t relax till I show it
There’s a funny feeling back this fall

31 cyclical flavors
On your tongue as this season quavers
You’re the one who smells like rain
And something I can’t verbalize at all

Me and my sweetheart
Unstoppable
We were born in the same hospital
About four years apart

Brought back to modest homes
In the shadows of the soccer domes
Our mothers clung to cordless phones
As the summers all began to drone by

Five accountants
Four in real estate
High school friends at their wits’ ends
With reason to anticipate

Some cataclysm
That’s slowly creeping down
Every year they smell that fear
Just trickle in
Like a fickle wind
And spread its deadliness around this whole town

But me and my sweetheart
Unstoppable
We were born in the same hospital
About four years apart

Brought back to modest homes
In the shadows of the soccer domes
Our mothers clung to cordless phones
As the summers all began to drone by

Known as the flirty one
I met you, I was thirty-one
I just stood around and hoped that you would notice

Figured I had given up
Like people who smoke with the windows up
In their Tauruses singing choruses so hopeless

In love with the crooked tooth
Where the snow boot hit you in your youth
In this endless grid
Where the springtime hid like crocus

We’ll drive out to Bloomfield Hills
Laugh at the size of the utility bills
As the futility spills and I’ve lost all my focus

It doesn’t have to feel that way
We’ll find the place where the good things stay
When the Dairy Queen of the quarantine reopens

Nobody acts like they know it
I can’t relax till I show it
There’s a funny feeling back this fall

31 cyclical flavors
On your tongue as this season quavers
You’re the one who smells like rain
And something I can’t verbalize at all

Me and my sweetheart
Unstoppable
We were born in the same hospital
About four years apart

Brought back to modest homes
In the shadows of the soccer domes
Our mothers clung to cordless phones
As the summers all began to drone by

Appears on Keego Harbor