Date-Stamping Machine by Matthew Milia

The television is a date-stamping machine
It's playing a movie I saw with my dad
When I was fifteen

Some winter break
When every lake was frozen clean
A dirty snow bank, a worried low tank
Of gasoline

The television is filling up with snow
And the dense contents of every night I ever did know
Down Livernois at the Big Boy I let it go
But late at night the reruns bite of the
90s sitcom show

At the library you were a date-stamping machine
You'd stamp my hand when I'd come and stand
Against your desk and lean
In so sweetly, not discreetly nor obscene                       
Aw, my little date-stamping machine

I Don't Know When I Am Anymore by Matthew Milia

I'm the slush gush martyr
Of Keego Harbor
I'm the parter of the frozen Sylvan Lake
Water
And I'm in love with this crooked
Optometrist's daughter

And I don't know when I am anymore

I'm the cameraman
For the abandoned township meeting
Recording how your summer tan
Dissolved to snowy sheeting
Constantly awaking in the sneering bed of exes
We've repositioned Michigan
Now we're nearing the nexus

Still I don't know when I am anymore

And I am eagerly awaiting
Your next installment
And what dreaming of a Cheers reunion
In my old dormitory basement hall meant

But I don't when I am anymore

Treadmill by Matthew Milia

I walk through Sylvan Lake at night
I gawk through the window at the TV light
Dripping off the wall of an old friend's parents' bedroom
Slipping down the hall from an old friend's parents' bedroom

Down the flight of stairs where we once lifted a treadmill
Up the flight of stairs back when parents still bought treadmills
And assembled it inside that old friend's parents' bedroom
Trembling with pride of possessions turned to heirlooms

Where the TV light now sifts outs to the dark street
The frigid TV light drifts down onto my dark feet
That creep along the lake
Just like Halloween is broken
A car alarm's awake
And a sleeping car's been woken

Across Sylvan Lake
Where I stand in front of this
Large estate where I once had my first kiss
The babysitter lied
The lips had all been flavored
The patriarch had died
My synapses all wavered

In the autumn night

Went Down by Matthew Milia

I turned 27
On the day of the election
Teleported rudely to some movie
We once saw

Despite my soft intentions
And Amtrak missed connections
I never thought you'd hurt me
Or desert me here so raw

You fucked over me
So I will not be seeing you
The way that shit went down's a shame
It's true

I never thought that we
Could be estranged from what we knew
Turns out I didn't know
A thing about you

Maybe you will wise up
When the puddle around your platforms dries up
I don't care, I won't be there
To hear your giggle then

With all your pretty knick-knacks
In your bedroom with my heart attacks
Is where I'll be when you try to see
The love we had back when

You fucked over me
So I will not be seeing you
The way that shit went down's a shame
It's true

I never thought that we
Could be estranged from what we knew
Turns out I didn't know
A thing about you

Song for Paloma by Matthew Milia

Winter rains and window panes
And the banes of my existence
Dish racks and the swishing smacks
Of Paris in the distance

Sign online for a Valentine
Or a version of the New Year
Impersonating some young face of mine
Seen once in her mirror

Paloma has a voice
That is womanly and choice
And throaty in the moment
That she speaks
Met her once or twice
And it always was nice
But I've thought about her
When the midnight sneaks
Off to the vague dark blue
Again

When every brand of love I've bought's been
Marked up and expired
And the smell of pencils keeps me up
When childhood's rewired

I've talked to her till the strange daybreak and dawn
Got reacquainted
I've walked with her on mental sidewalks snowed on
And ice-painted

I've kept a cabinet of French verbs and backup contact lenses
Imaginary rescues that I guard with self-defenses

I sang to her for one whole night
In the silliest of tenses
On some sweet night I'll make her sing for me
As my throat clenches 

Because Paloma has a voice
That is womanly and choice
And throaty in the moment
That she speaks
Met her once or twice
And it always was nice
But I've thought about her
When the midnight sneaks
Off to the vague dark blue
Again

Song for Ben by Matthew Milia

Coffee in the afternoon
Coffee in the evening
Temperature was opportune
You can smell the day's heat leaving

People getting famous
And they jet them to a distant planet
All that remains nameless
Can never be taken for granted

You kiss her and she tastes like gin
She tastes like pine needles
When you kiss she tastes whiskey
But these things don't impede wills

The car window is whistling
Your fingers smell like lighter fluid
The heater's on and hissing
And the equilibrium is humid

Late June and the tents are strewn
All across some lakeshore
All your friends and dividends
They impugn any ache, you're

Breathing in the color
And exhale black and white smoke duller
But beautiful to see
You're just young as you'll ever be

Song for Julie by Matthew Milia

Early winter morning and the moon's up in a gray sky
There's a girl with a duller sun and a black moon to color each eye
Up in Traverse City where the winter is so shitty
And the prettiness of blue ice
Is so sad

When the thaw sneaks in and the snowmobiles sink
Into the lakes
And all winter all you did was drink
And make a few mistakes
You can feel so bad

One night I was driving and the world seemed so conniving
Bit my face and wasted all the blood saved for surviving
Julie was a Catholic in the wrath of young Petoskey
Catholic blood, like summer mud, it's warmed up by the whiskey
And I went to St. Hugo, way downstate in Oakland County
When July comes it dumbs you to just buy into the bounty

Julie, in the summer when you're standing besides
The melted lakes
And everywhere you turn are the whitest of brides
Cutting wedding cakes

Early winter morning and the moon's up in the day sky
There's a girl with a duller sun and a black moon to color each eye

Wanna Turn by Matthew Milia

What keeps you up at night?
Anticipation or the fright?
Is there still a chance you might
Never wanna turn away from
Last year's holy light?

Do you still wear those wings?
The silver ones that I bought you last year?
I suppose those are the sort of things
That get put away
When foreign friends start to appear

I don't think about you down in that booth
In the end when you tried to look so hard
I think about the mornings and your chipped tooth
But I don't care about the truth
If you don't care about my heart

I go down to Waterford alone
I'm taking back the places that were mine
The flea market where faces made of stone
Make it known
The empty space beside me in the line

But I don't think about you down in that window frame
All the snows got in and exposed that risky flame
I don't think about you much of anyplace at all
Last year's holy light is too bright to cling to or view you
At all

What keeps you up at night?
Anticipation or the fright?
Is there still a chance you might
Never wanna turn away from
Last year's holy light?

'Cause if I met you tonight
I'd wanna turn
To try to do it over right

If it all started tonight
I'd wanna turn
To try to keep that holy light

Wanna turn

Christmas from a Deadmall by Matthew Milia

Mid-November
100.3
Have yourself
A Merry Little Christmas, baby

I hardly ever leave the house
I wish that I was back
In your little red shack

I am home from war or some tour of some blurry life
To some November world where
You're not my girl or my wife

Drive to Somerset Mall and my sweat pants fall
Move down Square Lake Road
In broken code
In a trance, all

That I could ever need
Is to know there's no loss
What could supersede
Your warm sheets, my Ms. Santa Claus

There's the subdivision
That my nana lives in, where
Christmas lives in basement boxes and
90s sitcom television

Mid-November
WNIC
I'll be home for Christmas
Alone with Bing Crosby

Drive down two-seventy-five
Inside my heated orb
Pretend I'm picking up your
Absent ghost from the airport

But I woke up in Frandor Plaza
In the middle of the night
There was no one there
Just blinding light

In fifteen years, Somerset Mall will be
Just like them all
Summit Place
Dump it all to waste

I pass the white roadside domes
Where the past plays indoor soccer
I pass the bright mansion homes
Where the dusk collects in lockers
I pass the night as it combs
Its way into my adult hair
I pass the light as the night
Stings youth with its sharp air

Merry Christmas, everyone
I see my world so undone
And gone
But where to?

Oh, you
Happy New Year too

(Last New Year's you past through here on the way to your new life and in the childhood bedroom of my father's house I made believe you were my wife.
Your car got stained white in the blizzard world, looking frozen like it had traveled through time through that blizzard world we knew together.
You left and I can't make coffee without being overwhelmed by the simultaneous reminder and absence of your simple sweetness.)

Merry Christmas, coffee pot
It's beginning to look a whole lot like
Christmas

Somerset Solo by Matthew Milia

I'm going down to Somerset solo
The bummer that you met in the long-sleeved polo
On the skywalk where the passers-by talk
Sassy upper-classers and their bastardized "YOLO"
Carpe diem ideology free 'em from the prepubescent
Designer tedium

Treadmill motion on a retrograde track
Fanny pack holding such uncanny lack
Thinking about the freshman year Christmas dance
Bump and grind in tightening pants
Corsage pinned in my collarbone flesh
Teenage gowns of gauze and mesh

I saw the best minds of my generation pissed
Or brain-freezed up at the Tasty Twist
Ziploc'ed, unredeemed Chuck E. Cheese tix
That my grandma saved for me when I was six
We used to sneak into the Christmas Eve gifts
Now it's all spotty sex and Netflix rifts

Here's what I got you for Christmas this year, dear
A seashell which, if you put it to your ear hear
Me crying like a hundred manger babies
With my eyes frothing like a dachshund with rabies
Now you're the one to exploit my grief
The way they portray Detroit's need for relief

Fruit cakes, fruit flies, fermentation of piss
In the urinal of your new abyss
Your teary-eyed, weary pride, insipid blues
I'm gonna mention them in all my interviews
I told you not to stuff that napkin in that drawer
You're gonna find it someday and feel so sore

I wish I didn't wake to your dead lake eyes
There's a universe of images I'd rather cognize
Like my grandma's slender waist cutting cake at her wedding
Or my father's tender face
As a toddler off sledding
I hope your cigarette always stays long
And your dirty dishes clank to a Christmas song

That's Teemu's squeak-toy