3 Poems

By PJ Lombardo

Love Will Set You Free

Crawling like a baby
through the softness of the moss

Above you bugs taunt
Her bugs taunt you
from above

My sullen machine
sunbathes under
aggressive blue
surges of serotonin

She hands me a bundle of violets

her holographic flowers
They cinder and shriek

Everywhere she runs, I follow, a true puppy

A spitepolished mastiff
set to sink
everybody’s garden
in streams of her sunny piss

I let her lick my face
because love is all that we need

Locusts torpedo your childhood treehouse

I watch them
and grin a scourge of blueberries
and when i grin i lie

and the lie titles her poem
Her poem about love and money and need

Ju-On

Slumberous with distance, the attic
houses twists of wind

I’m the only animal for miles
congested with sighs
wasting in a mill

Larynx aswarm with bulletpops

yeah it’s alright, there’s slime in my sink
I wipe it with my wide blue tongue

I wag my chainsaw hypnotic
at all the lovesick
passing ghosts
on frostbitten bedrest
& await a morphine pellet
to crush inside
this avaricious honey

Pacing the Calumet City Suites

Garden in the elevator
lingers unattended
smothered in orange & cigs & cocoa

While this hotel teeters vacant
I dream a cartoon roof
where my cats swirl
green gray maple sage

A gap to light my
ponderance my shrugging
heart A gap
or tube?
or shard?
torched?

Torching the earliest july winks
when i’m furthest up the shitladder
tipsy on a
perennial cloud

Bends of sage
lay ravenous with strangers like
jesus deadmeat christ

PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. His recent chapbook, HATE, DANCE was made available earlier this year by Bottlecap Press. In addition to his writing, he serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. Read his work in Mercury Firs, SPECTRA Poets, KEITH LLC, and elsewhere.