PJ Lombardo

Before and After Photographs

Whenever I speak to old friends, I speak
the same way I used to. They have moved on.

Sex is all I ever get caught upon. Yesterday,
in a basement, we were flooded. I tried
my hardest

not to be selfish. I cannot tell if I am,
because when I kiss I can tell
how our bodies connect and separate
and I am aware of the balance in the stars,
in the selves that we create without trying.

But when I am in love and apart, there
is nothing but You, the someone enveloping what
could be mutualism, but I am a
parasitic boy of legal age to buy cigarettes
and scratch offs. Why do we assign an
age, where we are permitted to begin

to wreck ourselves? I’ve been smashing
the glass menageries inside my psyche
for years; the cops don’t care. Shit,
they say, don’t get too close to that one.
And no one ever could.

---

Howl

for High Point Regional High School, and Allen Ginsberg- highest apologies.

I saw the worst minds of past generations spill inaccurate prophecies like cheap alcohol,
claiming high school would prove itself to be the best years of our lives
to children who could never believe them:
who walked in on parents shooting heroin,
who smoked themselves to sleep due to paranoid insomnia,
who slipped schizophrenic between the sheets with lovers who threatened to kill themselves,
who mopped up their girlfriend’s blood,
who couldn’t eat for months and vomited half-meals into toilet bowls, which they thought to be half-

empty

who were told every day, from the first day of kindergarten, that they would break the law
who finally broke the law and were brutalized for being criminals and not people,
who were pulled over for driving too slowly, and ticketed for driving too black,
who listened to punk to get by, only to find its corpse in tatters near a Hot Topic,
who emptied themselves onto paper and were told they could never live with it,
who were sodomized and then told they shouldn’t have worn lipstick that night,
who were abused by Adderall, Xanax, Ambien, Vicodin, and then scrutinized for abusing them,
who stole their parent’s gin so their father couldn’t drive drunk anymore,
who brought lighters to school to light candles for dead friends, then expelled for bringig them,
who fucked people they didn’t love because the television told them to,
who sucked down Diabetes soda because it was the only lunch offered,
who watched their neighbors carry guns that their untreated sons would bullet-wound classmates with,
who carried crumbs of weed in their pockets and were sent to juvenile hall for being dangerous,
who were sold complacency and directed to ask, “Is this going to be on the test?”
who wept when close friends stabbed parents for crack money,
who were given crack money instead of attention,
who were labeled attention whore for wearing cut clothes and asking for help,
who skinny-dipped and were slut-shamed for melding with nature,
who got pregnant because they loved somebody in a world with imperfect people and imperfect

condoms

who discussed books in classes they cared about and had no one to eat lunch with afterward,
who saw father’s faces in caskets and cursed them, for making them look up to something with cancer,
who laminated fake I.D.s to buy tickets to concerts for bands meant for youth,
who filed into lines that they heard were intended for them, then gassed in Nazi showers,
who got caught fucking someone who cared about them, then abandoned by family that didn’t,
who falsely believed that the same someone wanted to be with them for more than a week,
who needed to kick the shit out of a freshman to prove they belonged, then bawled back at home,

pondering how cruel a rock he could prove Earth to be,

who cut slivers of cocaine with credit cards they never needed to forget something they did,
who woke up four years too late to realize that their dreams were nightmares,
who detested, yet resigned themselves to, the fact that a suburb hovered in their hearts,
who, friendless, longed to hop freights,
who found freight-hopping aspirations comatose in the hospital, and, fearful, pulled the plug,
who kissed and screwed and dug and wrote and sang and strummed and broke and played and desired,

desire, desire, desire, desired, and thus, crawled up a noose, hung themselves bluntly, and never

knew they would be mourned in the morning by anyone who knew their face and how it moved,

vibrant and dimpled with potential,

and who ended it, thinking it would never cease, and never saw it, ultimately, thankfully, finally cease.