after Manhattan Baby (1982)
So lost inside this visiting bruise
Eyes fastened, a husk of prior revolts
Blue tearlight clogs your prayers
Through their looser slats
When I spot you in the morning
Splayed like dormant magma
seeping past containment
My dog smiles very hungry
at the rivers rivering down
your blue forearms
Like an ill historian
my dog sniffles and my dog thinks
And in her blank, citiless mope
your blank and citiless next life
congeals as a cloud be
tween two foul confusions
**
after Trouble Every Day (2001)
One slowblue huff down the aircraft cabin
Lifeless forearms curtain the aisle
You part them with resignation
Glum pinches of light burn
blue off the carpet
Soon there’ll be none
no electricity left
in this tired dirt
(So much is already
swimming towards the sun
Like billions of sperm or billions of minutes
Spent on unresolved grief
Huddling in a warhead, frivolous)
I look you under a bridge
in this park in late july
quivervox out some damaged speaker
some speaker, damaged blue
it didn’t belong to anybody
It didn’t belong to you or me
Two cannibals
weeping in a park
passing under damned airplanes
dewy papercuts
on our thoraxes
Once, on earth, there was theft
Now there is sloth
And a blue dent in your mouth
where the battery never fit
**
after Smiley Face (2007)
At the agora everyone glares
One paranoid tryst unites all god’s critters
In shimmering antisociality
Music grips the boardwalk
Feral threats hiss behind
smiling faces
When I arrive at your castle
Alligators deliver me
Baskets of oranges and alligators croon at me
Of bygone destiny
Of skeletons disintegrated with the biological vertigo of wet love
Of rapturous clarion politics
And i say that’s fine but
my knees are sore my teeth are stolen
there is a soup beneath my house
blubbering and scalding
like manatees stranded
beneath a venutian summer
Two hours later
Gatorblood yolky
on my hands
on the glaring face
of my glaring mirror
Breathless martyr complex
Bound inside a prism of prolactin
**
after Crash (1996)
Battery is an energetic crime
to which every living creature
commits unchanging
I think
when the sun finally sinks
into the broad stomach of the horizon
I will break a screwdriver
inside your ignition
and all the poems we wrote apart will melt together
like hot steel
on an untended highway
somewhere below los angeles
animalic, afloat
**
PJ LOMBARDO is a writer from New Jersey. He earned an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and he co-founded GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. HATE, DANCE, his chapbook, was recently released by Bottlecap Press. Read his work in Works & Days, The Quarterless Review, SARKA, Spectra Poets, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere.
