Milo M. speaks in the language of rivers and ruptures, of fig trees and fire escapes, of childhood forts dug into the Earth like a return to the womb. He is the kind of man who doesn’t just tell you his story—he performs it, conjures it, weaves it from the air like a street magician with pockets full of metaphors. He’ll call himself a beatnik, a wordsmith, a percussionist of the soul. But really, Milo is a human poem—half jazz, half Psalms, all heart.
He was born in Carmel-by-the-Sea, an aptly named town in the bay area. But the beauty of the coast did not reflect his early childhood. Tragically, when he was only six and she was only nine, his sister died of leukemia. From there, the family portrait darkened. A schizophrenic mother. A stepfather whose cruelty came wrapped in control. “It was a house of pain.” He would be kept awake by all night interrogations. By the time most kids were still learning multiplication, Milo had been exiled to the garage, then to the ground itself—a mucky wasteland where he slept on a rolled up rug next to dog poop. He was no more than eight at this point. By nine, he was exiled out of the house altogether—forced to live outside in an underground bunker he dug with his own small hands. “I didn’t think anything of it. I just needed somewhere to be.”
There, under dirt, cardboard, and stars, he built a life out of flashlight beams and library books. “I wasn’t allowed to have toys, but I could check out as many books from the library as I wanted. So, I was a voracious reader. I was reading 400 page books when I was nine.” Books were the only solace Milo found in this dark period of his life. Books, and when his grandma would recite poetry. She was the first person to encourage him to write poems of his own—unknowingly setting him on a path that would take him soaring through the rest of his life.
Eventually, the perimeter of his exile expanded and before he had hair on his chest he was handed a whopping $28 and placed on a bus to San Francisco. For a while, he slept in the breezeways of San Fran—making his way as a kid on the street. But eventually the cops got a hold of him and he was shipped back to the house of pain.
After plotting for some time, he made his way to living with his father in Toronto. His father was an old time beatnik hippie and so were all his friends. So, when Milo found himself in one of their pot smoking circles, he looked to his dad for approval. One head nod and that was it. Heaven in a puff. “It felt like bread and butter.” By the time he was 14, he was drinking and smoking every single day. Add onto that pills and LSD and whatever else Milo could get his hands on. He was some mix of Hunter S. Thomson and a drug pharmaceutical rep. Vodka to calm the tremble in his arms when slow dancing with the girl he liked. Acid to crack open new dimensions behind his eyelids. Weed, barbiturates, pills, powders, opiates, a salt shaker of this and that—alchemy, he called it. Daily alchemy.
As a boy, he didn’t get toys—he got books. As a teen, he didn’t get therapy—he got music. Drums to be exact. Like poetry, it was all about the rhythm. In high school, his full focus went towards music—missing most of his junior year. This resulted in him flunking out…despite the fact that he was testing in the top two percent in all of California. He took this as a lesson—the first he had attended in a long time. Milo picked himself up, refocused himself, and went back to school the following year. He graduated with honors and eventually went on to attend San Francisco State and, later down the line, grad school at USC.
From the moment Milo hit college—maybe even from the moment he took his first hit—he began his slam poetry lifestyle. Creativity surrounded him. Slam poetry competitions, playing with bands in various clubs, moving around the country and following his passions. The most pragmatic of you must be asking yourselves, “How did he afford this lifestyle?” Well, he had jobs. For many years, he worked at Oracle Park. That is, until the baseball strike of ‘94 put everyone in the industry out of work. After that, he got a job working on a 49 foot sailboat. Milo traveled throughout the Mediterranean, speaking only in French to the Belgian crew. He drank with the Belgians like they were Vikings off to sea. “No matter how drunk we were, there was always one more for the dreams.”
For 45 years, his alchemy worked. He was functional. He was fucked up. He was flying. He was perfectly in tune with the rhythm of the world.
And then, the music stopped.
It began with a sound—his own, ironically. A new musical invention he created, the Xilu: a hedonic metal cube of bells and vibration, a new frontier in rhythm. But playing it in his apartment rattled the wrong cages. Neighbors turned. Landlords joined in. He was evicted from the very home that had been his sanctuary for 16 years. Everything he owned—lost. He began to unravel. Drinking more than he ever had to drown the emotions. “I melted down.” Speechless. Wordless. A writer without a clause.
Somewhere in the collapse, the story shifted. A friend—another lover of poetry—reached out. Milo was guided into detox. A woman at the detox took one look at him and said, “Beit T’Shuvah is the place for you,” and she was right.
And that’s where the poem changed meter.
“ Beit T’Shuvah is like a red carpet into the rest of my life,” Milo says with a glistening hope in his eyes.” Since arriving here, he has jumped head first into everything Beit T’Shuvah has to offer. “This is the Hebrew school I always wanted to go to.” Here, he plays drums for Saturday Shabbat. He studies Torah like it’s spoken word. He even started his own poetry group!
There’s a different song in his soul. Softer. Cleaner. No less vivid. He still writes poems that sidestep confession in favor of collective truth—“This is not about Milo,” he insists, “this is about the we.” But there’s a purity to his pen these days. Less distortion. More depth. More light. Even in the dark words, there’s a pinhole of dawn. A glimmer. A line break that turns into a lifeline.
There’s a particular kind of beauty in seeing someone survive. In watching a man who once lived underground now rise every morning with sunlight on his face. In hearing someone who lost almost everything say, with reverence and awe, “This is exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’ve already written the first two acts in this play, and here comes the third act. I wanna write it the way I wanna write it, and I don’t want it to be a tragedy.”
Because maybe the point of poetry—and of recovery—isn’t to make perfect sense. Maybe it’s to hold the nonsense with grace. To whisper beauty into the bruise. To take all the noise and mold it into music. Milo is doing just that. One word, one beat, one grateful breath at a time.