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

Home Improvement by Matthew Milia

You called me up
You said, “Are you still alive?”
I said I’d just been sitting in my bed at night
And listening to I-75

The motorcycles are very loud
I wish I had something to advertise
Of which I was half as proud

September’s landed
And soon the leaves’ll land, too
Maybe we’ll rake a pile
And I’ll fall in right after you

You can try to clarify each moment you’ve spent
As the suburban Detroit fall spills out your ears
It reminds me of the backyard set on Home Improvement
Although I’ve lived her firsthand 30 years

Your mother called me
She said she didn’t know where you’d been
I said the last time that I’d seen you
Was at the Franklin Cider Mill when
You looked up at the sky
And said it was similarly hued
As the night that your grandma died
And you family ate Chinese food

I had that dream again
With the vicious ex-lovers
With suspicious motives
As they hid there beneath your covers

A childhood friend’s dad started a talent agency
They tried to throw me some voiceover work selling shoes
But maybe on account of my midwestern nasality
I was unable to give them anything they could use

Pour the lakes of coffee that I drank
When I die, into the tank
Of desperate daily perseverance
If you’re able to get the clearance

I want death by morning breath
And a rerun of our chats
As the world wakes in the pre-dawn
And checks their social media stats

Somewhere it is always almost Halloween
Somewhere you are always almost turning 17

The solitary moment’s all I’m endlessly defending
I’m stuck inside forever and it’s never not endlessly ending

Appears on Keego Harbor

Inherited Cars by Matthew Milia

The Hail Mary you sent me
Was a full week tardy
I just wanna be the cigarette you sneak
Outside your family Thanksgiving party

And the resentment’s grown larger
It’s fully juiced on your forgotten phone charger
That’s still plugged in beneath my bedside table
It channels something I’m unable to label

And when I go out walking
And the dusk sounds like my past lives are talking
I don’t wanna see the sun
I don’t wanna see anyone

What remains now
But inherited cars
And the stars’ smoky evacuation?

If you tried to abduct me
I’d make it back
To sleep in the black high school tomb
Time can’t corrupt the immaculate lack
That’s left there in the back bedroom
Or steal the feel that’s ours
As the dusk shadows
Straddle the bars
Of our inherited cars

You eyeball yourself in the gas station mirror
And set off the auto hand dryer
You can’t recognize your face
But you recognize the fear
That you might be a compulsive liar

You drive past the complex
Where your grandparents answered the phone
At the end of their days
You’ve lost any context
For the world that was transferred
To you in the subtlest ways

What remains now
But inherited cars
And the stars’ smoky evacuation?

If you tried to abduct me
I’d make it back
To sleep in the black high school tomb
Time can’t corrupt the miraculous lack
That’s left there in the back bedroom
Or steal the feel that’s ours
As the dusk shadows
Straddle the bars
Of our inherited cars

Appears on Keego Harbor

Haven’t Heard You Laugh in a Long Time by Matthew Milia

Snowflakes big as bumblebees
McMansions through the twilight trees
The sterile solace hibernating there

The weekend comes, we’ll have some fun
I feel so bad for anyone
Divorced from that sweet force
That made them care

And I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time

A secret sorrow fills the yard
And all along the boulevard
Buses growling northward to our home

The lilacs bloom and I’ll be there
A bathroom where the light’s so rare
Streaking in a childhood monochrome

And I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time

Everyone that you know
Has got a reason to
Hold onto the flow
That sent them into
The present tense is full of recompense and wonder
It’ll level out just like a shout blends into thunder
We’ll drive up Adams Road until the wheels fall off and I just

Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time

Snowflakes big as bumblebees
McMansions through the twilight trees
The sterile solace hibernating there

Appears on Keego Harbor

Autumn America by Matthew Milia

I shaved my face this morning
For a laugh
Oh, I’d shave the past three years
If I didn’t think that they’d grow back

I saw your face this afternoon on someone’s phone
The look upon your eyes was just an endless dial tone

And I’m the one calling
To say that I am falling
Faster than the masterplan did anticipate

Yesterday morning I woke up to find
Your little warning about leaving things behind
Without ever really knowing what they’re worth
And I’ve been leaving things
Far behind
All around this earth

We could be so fine
But I don’t wanna make you
Toe the broken line
No, I just wanna take you there
Into the sunshine
Of autumn America

Will I return to Keego Harbor
Where I am from?
When turning 31 has got me feeling kind of dumb
But then it won’t be long before I’m 32
Flirting at the bar-and-grill
With Jill and her tattoo

That says “I’m sorry”
And I’ll be sorry, too
And look around
All over town
For any glimpse of you

Yesterday morning I woke up to find
Your little warning about leaving things behind
Without ever really knowing what they’re worth
And I’ve been leaving things
Far behind
All around this earth

We could be so fine
But I don’t wanna make you
Toe the broken line
No, I just wanna take you there
Into the sunshine
Of autumn America

Appears on Keego Harbor

With the Taste of Metal on Its Tongue by Matthew Milia

I can’t believe how reluctant the warmth has been
As we wait
And the shitty cars that jumped the gun
They blast their stereos till the windows shake
With the sound

Yesterday you and me drove out to the place
Where the sun
Shoots down from outer space
And shines off everyone standing there

Dumbfounded in drive-thru lanes
Or the hospital parking lot
On the brink of Pontiac

Well, I still remember how it used to be
When the world was still young
It broke in the morning
It settled in the dusk
With the taste of metal on its tongue

I buried an old lifetime in the off-ramp’s fresh overgrowth mess
Where blue jays and cardinals and starlings and darlings of the scene obsolesce

As the night shuts down all the big-box stores open up for the day
As the day wears on all the traffic lights dangle and blink their lives away

We’re dumbfounded in a set of clothes
That were bought years ago
From some bargain bin
That our grandmother’s knew before they’d go home

I still remember how it used to be
When the world was still young
It woke in the morning
It settled in the dusk
With the taste of metal on its tongue

Appears on Keego Harbor

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

Condo Lakeshore by Matthew Milia

Oh, my friends, what can I say?
In some strange year on an even stranger day
Well, I guess I’ve had some luck
But overall I felt like I’ve been stuck
Inside a department store
Where no one looked before they locked the door
So I’m waiting overnight
Consumed by love, just starving for the lightning
This soft summer we’ll go find the brightening
The sky above some condo lakeshore might bring
The great reminder we’ve been looking for

Dead streets full of slush
Dead friends who eventually lost touch
Dream houses you might buy
On some part of town you deliberately drive by
Small talk just burns my ears
A solo walk across town turns my gears
Back to a hopeful mode
If I don’t bust it I just might explode, dear
Thirty slushy lifetimes flush my right ear
Where I just sneeze some antifreeze and light beer
But I got reason to believe by next year
On a long drive home down Woodward we’ll be free

Kids in a backyard ravine
Clinton Watershed snow, cold and clean
Trace a trail back to the fridge
From Krogers through misnomers like Quail Ridge
Middle-class lifetime galore
Midnight run to your sacred party store
Best case scenario
A hidden paradise where we can go
A subdivision full of friends
The sun sets low but the feeling never ends

Yeah, and something’s gotta shake eventually
I know that, but who can wait a lifetime to break free?
It’s all black
The sky above some condo lakeshore swallows Pontiac
The pre-storm song of sweetness sung for me

Appears on Keego Harbor

Sunburnt Landscapers by Matthew Milia

Sunburnt landscapers in the country club gulch
The entire spring world smells like wet humans
And rotten mulch
And the lilacs
My done-to-death climax
Well, I don’t care
They’re all I’ve got there

The dumpsters behind the bleak tanning salons
The entire spring world is just broken roads and damp coupons
In the after-rain
The smell that I can’t explain
Petrichor mingled in your hair

You look so blissfully high
After you’ve had yourself
A good cry
And I know that
You are my…

Trailing behind the dumb vanity plates
Out past the outrageous Bloomfield Hills mansion estates
The lunch-timers and sad corporate climbers
Are driving home into the hot sun

Last night I slept in a hospital recliner
Next to your bed and I watched the tubes exit your hand
And then I wept alone in a diner
And pitifully prayed that you’re not one

You look so blissfully high
After you’ve had yourself
A good cry
And I know that
You are my…

I wanna list of every kid I used to know
And their current careers
My therapist insists I should let all this go
From my formative years

But the feral spring softness is swarming the offices
Where mutual funds and cummerbunds get rented out
The roads are all paralyzed
We travel the service drives
Searching for the slightest sign that it all might work out

We’re just sunburnt landscapers from the trashier towns
On the north edge of the county
Where the endless love always abounds

Where the oil change places
And terrified faces
Remind me that I’m in my heaven

You look so blissfully high
After you’ve had yourself
A good cry
And I know that
You are my…

Appears on Keego Harbor

Salad Bars by Matthew Milia

Salad bars in this frigid town
Where the repo’d cars are blood-red brown
October stars flash numbers down for keno

Candy corn in an empty cart
You still mourn the brand-new start
That ended with a broken heart
Yeah, we know

But somehow it doesn’t make you cry
To know the junk mail that you and I
Will still receive long after we’ve been long-dead

So I stop to give the psoriasis
That’s there above your eye a kiss
And sip a beer to hear just what this song said

No one’s nineteen for very long
Everything I mean, I’ve said it wrong

So do you see the danger?
And don’t you be a stranger
Yeah, that’s what your mom said
And it broke your heart apart
And then it sent you to the start of it again

Apartments passed down friend to friend
Till you’re standing at the decade’s end
With nothing really left to spend but more time

You’re in Madison Heights
When the morbid fascination bites
That’s triggered by the dull lights of some slow climb

Not so special after all
In the deathlike center of the mall
Where the broken skylight sunbeams fall on you

I flash to the children’s hospital
With the gown and IV that I pull
Behind me to the game room draped in blue

I never saw that blue so thin
I never heard from you again
You never knew this all could end, yeah we know

Now it’s salad bars in this frigid town
Where the repo’d cars are breaking down
October stars flash bright as the casino

No one’s nineteen for very long
Everything I mean, I’ve said it wrong

So do you see the danger?
And don’t you be a stranger
Yeah, that’s what your mom said
And it broke your heart apart
And then it sent you to the start of it again

Appears on Keego Harbor



Karen’s Just a Kid by Matthew Milia

That photo of your dad at your current age
Splattered like the ceiling of the microwave
Now the TV's splattered too

Someone sucked the sweet milk
From the bottom of your bowl
Your mom's been sad
I think she lost control
She tried to call you but you let it ring
Each toll for you

Don't believe
Each summer evening
Will be grieving in any way for you

We all know the plan
And the glow from your suntan
Will orbit in the planetary
Through and through

Maybe Karen's just a kid
But I still wanna know
What she hid inside
Her little room

I'm feeling like a little boy
With nowhere else to go
With nothing left to taste
But spit and gloom

And how'd you get so prone to this
Exaggerated loneliness?
When you can't even catch your breath at all

And Karen just turned 21
And you still yearn for anyone
To answer when you call
But Karen's just a kid

That summer you went mad down in Waterford
Your mom and dad went unmonitored
You tried to call them but the line was dead

Now I can't even tell you what time of the year
We find ourselves
Or what hemisphere
Or the shape your mouth took
When you looked to me and said

You said
Don't believe each little evening
Will be leaving
Its tender mark on you
We all know the score
And the jacket that you wore
Belonged to someone you swore
Would be immaculate and true

Maybe Karen's just a kid
But I still wanna know
What she hid inside
Her little room

I'm feeling like a little boy
With nowhere else to go
And nothing left to taste
But spit and gloom

And the cops creep up 14th Street
At the stop sign in the backseat
I see some kid I knew in study hall

And every day the world just shrinks in
Some familial extinction
Till it's so very small
And Karen's just a kid

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Why Is It? by Matthew Milia

Today I didn't leave the house
But a friend came by for a visit
Oh, why is it?

I called my mom
I called my dad
I listened to some new records Anna had
Oh, why is it?

I hear your voice in every room
But there's no one there
There's no one whom
I'd like to know but you

Why is it?

That I can tell
That you see the world the way
I do and I might as well
Stay around to see
If you can tell
You're the one I wanna see
And selfishly
I need to know
If you wanna
See me

Today I didn't leave the house
Though the weather was rather exquisite
Oh, why is it?

I paid the phone bill
I sent the rent
I made a dent in Crime and Punishment
But I still wanna know
Why is it?

I signed some 25-cent checks
And forged my neighbor's name
For the guy from FedEx

But then I went back to bed
Why is it?

That I can tell
That you see the world the way
I do and I might as well
Stay around to see
If you can tell
You're the one I wanna see
And selfishly
I need to know
If you wanna
See me

I hear your voice in every room
Every room

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Abruptly Old and Caffeinated by Matthew Milia

Service to the landline
Disconnected in year twenty-nine
And the nervous black universe
In the soft pit of your mom's purse
Where the years hid
In the Kleenex
And the tears slid
Down her V-necks
And the spring thawed us
Like a carton of ice cream
But we woke
Didn't we?
In a nice dream

Sooner or later
The sad refrigerator
Is holding brands that no one knows

A young imitator
Is standing in the crater
And he's wearing your forgotten clothes

Now we're young adults with tongues
Burnt on boiling coffee
The asthma in our lungs
Burnt away so harshly

Back when we were
Elated from the moment we're created
But who anticipated we'd be
Abruptly old and caffeinated?

Show me how you felt
The night we heard the world melt
From my room in some year
In some life far from here
And tell me the new name
That you earned when spring came
How it burned in your mind
As I learned it a third time

Each single person
With a tendency to worsen
I seem to think that we'll be friends

Why don't you call me?
And tell me all about the little way
You're terrified that this all ends

For now
We're young adults with tongues
Burnt on boiling coffee
The splinters from the rungs
You sweetly plucked them off me

Back when we were
Elated as the red sun penetrated
It slowly self-deflated
And we're abruptly old and caffeinated

Oh, what'd you do today?
You sleep until the sunlight is upon your eyes
And you won't get your way
If you don't try
To reach into what belongs to you
And take it back
But you don't want to

My mother's neighbor
Saw my picture in the paper holding
A high school photograph of her

I look just like my mother
If you mixed her with another
And froze in time the way they were

When they were young adults with tongues
Burnt on boiling coffee
I memorized the songs
You sang them to me softly

Back when we were
Elated as the girls that you once dated
The lips all separated
And you’re abruptly old and caffeinated

Elated from the moment we're created
But who anticipated we'd be
Abruptly old and caffeinated?

Elated when from St. Hugo graduated
Downhill we will spill
Over-caffeinated

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Schemer by Matthew Milia

My scheme
Was to redeem
Every previous scheme I had pulled

I thought
I had my shot
That's why I bought
Something for you to hold

Till I came
Back in the name
That I had when I started out

But I can't recall how it went
Or what it was all about

So I go power-walking with my mom
Through the first profile she had
On AOL-dot-com
And I may as well
Sign on

My dreams are of old teams
For which I warmed the bench on
The game where my grandparents came

And Halloween decorations mean
A lot to me
To the spot in me
That's hotter than the autumn sun
But colder than the autumn's shoulder
When the fall winds run

I stapled my fate to skateboard kicktails
And rash attachments on desperate emails
I'm drowning in dry cleaning tags and safety pins

Do you think it's something you still can make matter?
I wake up every Sunday in the pancake batter
With all my soccer trophies just posed like mannequins

Twenty short years
In my narrow hallway house

The televisions muted
I've booted any spouse
On an anniversary that's hinging off the door
The furnace is a nursery
For the only child we bore

And how it
Roars with old spit
On the carpet I installed

With my knees
Was it centuries
Ago when oh, how we crawled?

When I came
In with the name
That you gave me when I woke

Gently, evidently
All our time was just some kind of joke

My scheme
Was to redeem
Every previous scheme I had pulled

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Swollen Home by Matthew Milia

Always clearing my throat
In the exact sound as my mother
She drip-dried my raincoat
That I took from my dad's brother

This October
Will fill the Silverdome
Swollen home

Always smelling those burnt
Plastic TV dinners
After soccer practice we weren't so
Hungry as beginners

This October
Will explode the styrofoam
Swollen home

Birthdays next week will
Make it all fast-forward
So I’ll press on your hot cheek till
I'm in the apple orchard

The cider mills of Rochester Hills
Where I rewind
And automatically
Taste the static we find

I'm tripping off you when I get that youth rush
Sipping off you when I taste your toothbrush
You were faceless in some weird dream that I had
On the basis that I feared that you'd turned bad
Empty Pontiac when the snows dust
Save a place for you outside my lust

Save a place for me when our homes bust

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Attention Students by Matthew Milia

Can you hear me mutter
Your social security number
As I clean my apartment manically?

I text myself to make sure
The world didn't turn to vapor
While you might've been trying to contact me

So I'll spend a mild winter
Having reconciled the printer
That duplicates your sick smile endlessly

They say your past was checkered
But with every dental record
I couldn't find a single cavity

And the night you wrestled me to the ground
It just felt nice to feel your touch
I'd rather hear the deafening sound
Than the silence of your absent clutch

So I brought you down to my world
With mention of how it once was
Attention students
Blaring in my ear

Will the man who she marries
Still be there in two Januaries?
I can't say
But either way, the snow falls

I should do myself a favor
And curb this young behavior
Before my tongue slips into
Foreign phone calls

Another heartbroken sighting
Of your grade school name
In your mom's handwriting
The slow decay sure get its way
Now doesn't it?

So as you update your status
Prostrate on the mattress
But your word choice
Was in a stolen voice
Now wasn't it?

And the night you wrestled me to the ground
It just felt nice to feel your touch
I'd rather hear the deafening sound
Than the silence of your absent clutch

So I brought you down to my world
With mention of how it once was
Before the roaring
Snowmelt left me here

Yes, I brought you down to my world
Where you can hear the soft buzz
Attention students
Blaring in my ear

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Sometimes I Feel Like My Arm’s Falling Off by Matthew Milia

Sometimes I feel like my arm's falling off
I've been reaching so long for you
But you're in the place
Where all the addresses erase
And there's nothing that I can do

Just slurp on my stasis
I fell in love with every waitress
From Sylvan Lake to Pontiac
Memorized their makeup and their eyes as they take up
A plate from here into the back

I'm aware that I'm disappearing
It seems to be the natural way

Oh, goddamn

Could you say you've ever been lonely?
Could you say you've ever really been lonely?
Could you say you've ever been lonely?
'Cause I don’t think you have

Sometimes I feel like our old answering machine
With an infinity of nights inside
Choke on the vestiges of soft-spoken messages
From a lifetime that crawled off and died

So I spin like a floodlight
In the sky above so bright
From the nightclub a couple miles from here
Where as kids in the danger
We'd solicit a stranger
To buy us cigarettes and beer

And I'm alone at St. Hugo
When there's nowhere else to go
When there's nothing in the slush to find
I'm waiting for my mother
Or the touch of another
In the computer lab inside my mind

But I remember the feeling
Before the ceiling
Buckled under its own weight
I've tasted our fear since
The initial appearance
Of the expiration date

I'm aware I'm being evicted
I used to hold the skeleton key

Oh, goddamn

Could you say you've ever been lonely?
Could you say you've ever really been lonely?
Could you say you've ever been lonely?
'Cause I don’t think you have

Sometimes I feel like my arm's falling off
I've been reaching so long for you

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Congratulations Honey by Matthew Milia

Congratulations honey
It's once again that time of year
Your dad's Disability money
Seemed to make the bad things disappear
But it's even cold when it's sunny
It's even cold when you're near me
I tried to hard to be funny
I tried to hard for you to hear me

When the family storage unit closes forever
And you'll never hear the motorized ornaments again
In some white trash towns where the solace drowns whenever
The muffler putters away like a birthday balloon
Losing wind

I lost your name in the autumn
Is there something else that I can call you?
You left me down at the bottom
Is there something I could do to stall you?

Because there's 30 years of back-to-school tears in your eyes
With the cleaning supplies that smell like coming home
And the leaves that scrape in their escape, it implies
A familiar voice that's growing faint
On the other end of the telephone

When the family storage unit closes forever
And you'll never hear the motorized ornaments again
In some white trash towns where the solace drowns whenever
The muffler putters away like a birthday balloon
Losing wind

Thinking about some house I knew in college
Thinking about some girl I knew in 6th grade
Thinking about the taste of her apology
And the smell of the coffee that my dad made

Congratulations honey
It's once again that time of year

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Puncture by Matthew Milia

Coffee grounds and awful sounds of parental bones breaking
Rental cars picking up stars in the making
Meanwhile the backyard has new knives for grass
It punctures my bare feet
And soccer balls hissing gas

The night that the winds rose abruptly and broke the fence
The unctuous world acquired a puncturing consequence
We slammed the storm windows from inside the bed
And I got so frightened when you slammed into me and said

On the smooth tar behind our unused local laundromat
A one-gallon plastic jug of 2% milk that
Slipped out of somebody's hand on a shortcut
Or maybe they threw it just to possibly see what

White cream expiring on a black backdrop can be
Sticky and violent or suggestively sexy
Or blessed and infested with the creatures of the heat wave
Stuck in the muck where our heaven had its street paved

But it feels different this time around
The sunburned bodies where I walk through the town
Way upstate where I stated my homage
To each organism that tasted the knowledge

Of dying ecstatically each time we come
Down to the river where I pierced my thumb
On the sharp gills of the perch I was holding
When all of the thrills of the search were unfolding
For me

The night that you proudly said you were immortal
And I wondered out loud how that would be an advantage
I said I thought death might be a merciful portal
To filter the holiness that we pilfered from the wreckage

Of coffee grounds and awful sounds of parental bones breaking
Rental cars dropping off stars for the taking
Meanwhile the lazy love we both outgrew
Is reincarnated as a girl who tastes nothing like you

You look different this time around
Is your middle name Catherine now?
Is your mother asleep in the garden?
Is your father still weeping or hardened?

And where is your bedroom that I'm made to memorize
Where all the red fumes of morning will vaporize
Where all the angels of sweetness were murdered
Where the holy completeness of that song was murmured
By me?

I feel different this time around
Not so ignorant to what I've found
Deep in the crease of the least of my brothers

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo

Alive at the Same Time by Matthew Milia

Tuesday morning
Karen's in my bed
I can tell I might be in over my head

I haven't got a thing to do today
I'm swimming in the coffee
Trying to find a way

To tell you that I need you
And that it frightens me
But I'm agreed to
Stay around to see

And tell you that I love you
Whatever that might be
To be alive contemporaneously

I'm glad that you and I've
Been alive at the same time
It’s just the way I’m trying to say
That I need you

I hope that you and I
Stay alive at the same time
It’s just the way I’m trying to say
That I love you

I walk myself down Michigan Avenue
I need a drink to think about what I should do
Before you hit downtown it's a no-man’s-land
And that's exactly where I tend to wanna stand

Constantly older than I ever thought I'd be
It seems the world stays young
And moves away from me

You're a little younger
It doesn't bother me
Tell your father what we said about Radio City

I'm glad that you and I've
Been alive at the same time
It’s just the way I’m trying to say
That I need you

I hope that you and I
Stay alive at the same time
It’s just the way I’m trying to say
That I love you

Wednesday morning, Karen's in my bed
I can tell I might be in over my head
Seems there's nothing I can't do today
I'm drowning in the coffee
Everything's okay

Appears on Alone at St. Hugo