A&W Orange and Brown by Matthew Milia

You taste like A&W
Orange and brown
Draw through your straw
Wash it all down
The strange age
The gas gauge
The rash upon my ribcage

But you'd never leave me in the lurch
Or deceive me when the search
For the morning
Gets boring
Mechanically scorning

Twenty-thousand broken tunes
A galaxy of afternoons
Birthdays of November ruins
Are soon to be my vehicle 

I'll be dozing in the divorced dads'
Devastated bachelor pads
It subtracts and then it adds
But all in all it's a miracle they do

That's when
I go where the college kids loiter
Just hang out and reconnoiter
The umbrage
The language
With each dumb pang of anguish

I think about how I spent my year
In a twin bed with young skin near
So blindly
Remind me
How you snuck that knife behind me

Some nights it's achingly ample
Some nights it's just a sample
Stamp a little dimple in the
Simple love you think is yours

But who's in your camp when the world darkens?
Dampening with snarking grins
The parking situation thins
When unwieldy eras lock their doors

But you know
I got a lot for you
But it'll never do
Oh, unless
Well, nevertheless

You go
Do what you gotta do
If you're not so true
I guess A&W
Is fading too

We'd walk through the town in an endless loop
In the rapidly melting ice cream soup
That stuck us together
In Frontier Ruckus weather

But ain't it precious?
The freshest scrape?
I faced rewind and erased the tape
And I saw
It all go
But I still hear the audio

Our sitcom plot line's terrible
It rots on the vine like a parable
Written by the veritable human punchline
You now kiss

I'll be driving around the Silverdomes
With the student drivers and mobile homes
The worst survivors of all my poems
Would never treat someone like this

I bet
Your makeup's indelibly smeared on that towel
I once feared it was permanently on me as well
Like the cinder
From that winter
And the slush along Dequindre

The ride that we got from the mechanic shop
From the Persian woman in the Mercedes drop-top
Her marriage
Miscarriage
We thought her stories bonded us in awareness

That nothing like that could happen to us
We were two of the luckiest
Bastards in the mastered art of
Barely ever giving a fuck

But in the end one fuck got gave
Two, if you count our literal behavior
The root beer, dear
Will you please save
A drop for me as you cutely suck?

'Cause you know
I had a lot for you
But it'll never do
Oh, unless
Well, nevertheless

You go
Do what you gotta do
If you're not so true
I guess A&W
Orange and brown are through
It'll be just like we never knew

Appears on Sitcom Afterlife