Open It Up by Matthew Milia

Hard-hopin' 
I can open
It up

Heartbroken
And soft-spoken
Ain't we all grown up now?

Mary-Lynn, when you call to me
There is little I can do
And you want to bring it all to me
Well, you know, I'd want you to

But seeing as there is no place
Seeing as there is no trace
I do not know if I can taste it
Anymore

Now I rub each tear duct with my hands
When someone's foreign bathtub product brands
Stung my heart and plucked my glands
Because it understands the smell
You wore

That's when I follow my dad down
To the video rental store
Mentally explore
The glorious
Phantasmagoria

To some sunny summer family reunion in a soccer practice park
Through a dark grainy camcorder
With '1994' in white numbers on the border of the lower right corner where you
Were quite pixelated by the men in the tans
Beside the subtly outdated minivans
In turquoise polos as the boys blow 'O's
Through the dirty mustaches they grew
Smoking Merit cigarettes you inherit from Papou
Pulled from soft packs in an '89 Buick Park Avenue
In slacks on the pickup lane cracks of the Catholic K thru 8 his great grandson goes to

There's a dead world locked in a Nintendo 64
In some divorced friend's mom's apartment bedroom drawer
And a chandelier of chrome in her white brick apartment home's
Shared stairwell where the farewells blew
And sag with the bags
Of sidewalk salt

You cannot disown
Your middle-school cologne
And the tedium
Is the medium that connects
All that is holy
I was the goalie
Who let in an infinitude of
Worlds
That I can't possibly disown
The snow
Ossified to bone
And got stained so black
By the track of the sliding doors
Of the modern cell phone stores
Chaldeans smoking sweetly
As the deeply dim night pours
For you

There's a meteorologist
On the local news
Whose hand I got to grip
On a fifth grade field trip
He's no long young-dad hip
For he's now as old as all of us
Would ever want to be
And the weather, we foresee
Will be better endlessly

Once Nana's
Backyard swallows us
The lawns aren't cut too short
And they abut the tennis court
And our ages are not cages
That we cannot re-assort

Oh, the obsolescence
Of your adolescence
Heavy as a copy machine
Gargantuan, elephantine
In an old friend's dad's 90s home office
With off-white purring processors
And PC blurs on monitors
They can't display the past so they
Just mark their time and darken

I'm just
Hard-hopin'
I can open
It up

Appears on Eternity of Dimming