The Back-Lot World by Matthew Milia

I still crackle
Like a motel
Frontier spackle
Summer backyard
Shopping cart
In our shadows
Late-day echoes
Weeds
Radios
Jesus Christ knows your
Freckled heart

To walk north as sun is setting
Hope of getting to
Your ghost-filled brimming field as
The still comes
All those churches
Splintering perches
Blacktown searches
Stooping faces
Placing childhoods

It’s a hot-town
Steam from the ground
Roads are unbound
Heart-strung and crowned
Through the lumbered trees
I killed a woman
She had it coming
She was myself and now I am free

Free to love you
You unspooling
When day is cooling rain clouds coming
Are lighter than the night
All is something
Lost in nothing
Your gravelly wiry frightening mind is
Built upon itself

We walk through the back-lot world
To the pioneer frontier where you forgot dear
Nights you should hold

Appears on The Orion Songbook