Julián Delacruz 

The Ghost Who Listens 

                                                                                  after Canisia Lubrin and Olena Kalytiak Davis                                                                                                         

“I has bouts of anxiety about LIFE CONTINUING after “I’s” DEATH 

These intrusive THOUGHTS are concomitant with the risks “I” TAKES 

“I” is very attached to “I’s” SUBJECTIVITY, “I” feels like “I” is being RIGGED 

“I” knows how involved PORN is when “I” rejects people of “I’s” own race, selecting WHITE BODIES 

“I” wants to RISK it all during Coronavirus crisis 

When “I” DIES, & “I” WILL DIE, “I” doesn’t want anyone to say “I” is PRETTY 

“I” feels an URGENCY after reading SHARPE’s “In the Wake” 

& is worried about “the making of bodies from FLESH, into FUNGIBLE commodities—

                 while retaining appearance of FLESH/BLOOD” 

“I” might be attracted to RACE play, “I” watched a scene in which Alessio Vega uses the N-WORD

“I” thinks “I” wants to hear this from “I’s” cis WHITE boyfriend, genuinely, as a person 

“I” doesn’t even believe in using JUSTICE language, “I” is simply APPROPRIATING it for AFFECT 

“I” wants to get down to this business of when “I” will actually begin to LOVE “I” 

“I’s” intrigued by TONY HOAGLAND’S “a poem is not a teddy BEAR” 

& “I” believes Anais Nin “in MUD & HUNGER, everything is DREAMED”

“I” finally bought LIGHTS for a ceiling fan & light is now PROJECTED into every corner 

& because “I” can’t DEAL with “I’s” dark IDENTITY, “I” starts using “I’s” PALM 

                  & slumps into “I’s” maw of INCORRIGIBLE sex addiction 

“I” believes it remains to be seen whether HUMAN nature can be course CORRECTed

“I” knows from personal experience, “I’s” a SWIRLER, a slut for Jungle JUICE 

“I” carries the picture of the weird colonial man into the bathroom where “I” enjoys the idea of being WATCHED 

“I” has parents who never respected “I’s” need for privacy as “I” poops, “I” was SPANKED 

by an Afro Caribbean mother, a white father, a rich mother, a poor father, they TAUGHT “I” to behave 

“I” removes the picture of the weird colonial man from  “I” kea after George Floyd’s MURDER 

“I” has quite Facebook & is “CLeanOSING the doors of PERCEPTION” 

“I” cleans out “I’s” room to find fifteen empty popper BOTTLES 

Remembering Floyd, “I” worries this cease, this lack, this DENIAL of benefit of being a citizen 

                  or of being human, can happen to “I” at ay time, has caused “I” to stay at HOME 

“I” doesn’t want to risk tear gas & FRACTURED SKULLS 

“I” thinks if “I” LOST “I’s” FINGERS it’d be the END of “I’s” LIFE 

“I does daily OIL pulls in front of a mirror pockmarked with TOOTHPASTE, 

though “I” is complicit in an economy OF BEAUTY that leaves OUT PEOPLE like “I” 

“I” reads through the Universal Timeline, “I” knows EARTH will be three times HOTTER than VENUS 

in a few billion years, and that the universe will CRUNCH but according to “I"‘s” FRIEND KATIE, 

“the stuff of us is always going to be around, has always been.” 

“-we’ve been CHEWED up & SPIT out by the machinations of the GALAXY, for like, ever” 

“I” wonders if “I’s” boyfriend is SILENT about extravagant forms of racist ABUSE 

& while climaxing, “I” dislodges a big pearl of SPIT onto his chin

“I” knows that in writing something like this, “I” is giving strangers the “KEYS” 

“I’s” worst-case scenarios: lung CRYSTALS, Kaposi’s SARCOMA, Sudden Sniffing DEATH Syndrome 

“I” is a person lucky enough to own a CEILING FAN 

“I” loves “I’s” backyard bougainvillea, though “I” still advocates for the BROWN spot of grass under her 

“I” believes that when you fuck, there is a GHOST who listens

“I” bites “I” self when you WALK AWAY 

Audio

SNAKEBITE PSALM

Waiting for results                       after doing it.                               With a meth head. 

      chlamydia                              has a rhythm                                  to it 

Post-test, I hear                            nurses whispering.                     about  Syphilis     

       every two                                    to three                                     months 

& I’m snarky w/the needle,         gleaming bottles.                       Penicillin hits deep, 

       my cock                                         hurts,                                        stings 

deeper than a tetanus shot.      The vaccine is colorless            and hurts. 

      from jerking                                  after sexting                              with men 

I imagine a scissor                       beneath me,                                a sick joke,

        doing someone’s                         history                                     homework 

to get rid of erections                   I need to stop thinking              of insertions 

             to pay for                                    a shot                                   & a pill,   

for what builds                               inside me,                                    cum spurting 

          & still,                                           i lack insurance                   paid for penicillin

barrels                                             of strained sulfur                        in my shower 

      & those welts                                   once a week                         for 3 weeks 

head all rusted                              with calcium deposits               only a landlord 

          i faced                                        admonitions                          came in cold & slow

can clean. For once,                      I want to feel clean                    not like this mound of dirt 

        waiting rooms                            peopled by persistent                  coughers 

at church.                                        For thirty days                             my cock until cured          

         signed my name                       hurried                                    in slapdash scripts   

won’t be a lightning rod               for jock straps.                             On this day, 

       waiting for results                      people have done it.              for centuries 

do not want                                    to be a queer man.                    Queer men are 

           even nietzsche                                died                                from the spirochetes 

always                                             giving each other                        snake bites. 

              doctors                                  used to clap                          bricks together 

Outside, the palo verdes              vomit the sidewalk                       in pointillist brush stroke 

         to rid a man                             of discharge                                  i 

The streets are                                blowing                                         crumpled blue masks

        have dug my hands                 into nietzche’s mane                 it is 

The month passes                         with slow applause                     from the palms 

       a small room                             and it is smaller                            than my 

& he’s conducting                           again                                            behind sheet-wrapped windows. 

          death                                      my name quarantined                  in that box 

Where I live, there’s                         so much berry                             & bird shit. 

    some say syphilis                          schizophrenia                          jungian shadows 

A cocktail is mixed,                          a liquid I distill                              for my guest 

          i say                                              stop fucking                               men in

from the fruit trees.                          Stars sparkle in the glass.          My guest 

       motel rooms                                  thin rubbery men                    stop fucking them

in those rumpled blue                    stockings,                                       crossdressed 

        the doctors                                 think the spirochetes                  will eat my brain

& panting                                          like he’s been killed.                      He cums. 

         one day                                         soon 

Audio      

Pompeii Revisited         

I’m watching the video we fuck in, 

the jazz of our li  ps cracking, gingersnaps. 

Cock between fingers I draw sap from a redwood 

with nothing to k   iss except video, 

fumes returning me to a corner of childhood

on the blue bedspread where I let men use me.

Always, I think of the first man to let the amyl

climb up my nose, incurring rope burns.

He was Venezuelan, with a scorpion tattoo,

eating me out on the fifth floor in the same building

where one of my classmates died

because her mother caught her fucking some dude

she chased out the door

down seven flights across the street. 

The girl fell when she looked out the window 

which had a faulty lock.

Everyone was sad but me, I didn’t know her.

Other people made a joke of her crushed forehead

but that is not what I want to remember. 

Most nights I’m between wine & a dolphin.

There are only a f               ew species that fuck for fun, 

but when I love, I’m tuna at the bottom of the crate. 

My fish scales say pick me pick me pi    ck me, 

but don’t              smell me, don’t smell     all the barrels I’ve been through

& all the cellars I’ve been turned from.

I’m a statue that lets thou            sands of pigeons shit on it.

I’m watching my hands crumple off my wrists. 

A thousand virtues have passed through me 

& I’m about to deal with another at the doctor’s

where I’m just a simple single boy 

writing irretrie          vable love notes— I’m Scheherazade—

when I get my on my phone I’m not looking 

for any q-tips or pipe cleaners, 

I’m not looking to be impaled by moose antlers 

or wrapped luxuriously in copper wire. 

I’m not brave enough to conduct myself 

as anything other than a mind reader who can only 

please himself—new nipple clamps from the guy 

who will give me chlamydia, 7.14 GB,

239i       tems of porn, five videos I will,        never delete, 

three OnlyFans subscriptions totaling thirty dollars a month, 

which had to happen after Tumblr’s demise —-

how I mourned & mourned until I was 

turned on by the Empire State Building’s rose color.

It was hard to wipe my computer’s thoughts.

Each time I attempted to quit VLC media player, 

I just wanted to see you again, unzipping your faded jeans & scuffed boots,

making me safe when I was nothing but outcast. Wanderer, 

I remember reaching up to touch a bit of your goat hair. 

“Are you a pornstar?”       “No,” you said, your voice a dim piano, 

“I’m a renai          ssance filmmaker.” I filmed you against your will 

because you kept leaving me for that other guy, 

dumping me into the via negative when you knew I 

was teenaged you fucked me in your red van

anyway, us going down that scenic hill, 

my hand curled                around your thumb.  

What I would do to get another heaping 

swallow full of stars from you, another 

sixty watts I can’t get from these guys 

who pass off their genitals like coins. 

No conduction, no, not from 

the twink who comes flitting the stairs

in a cross         shaped leather girdle, his desiring 

what was always done        to me but I couldn’t 

wash off my ghostly stains 

which is why I admire your clean, clean room, Steve, 

& I think your toilet is a throat.        to another world, 

& I think our sin            k is testing us with its incipient singing, 

glugging like it’s been hypnotized. 

Who if I called out would hear me

among the red stop signs ryin traffic lights?

Most mornings I scratched off skin from inside my nose 

I was bleeding so much from the poppers 

and now there’s just        a low grade headache. 

I carry Taos hum in my eyes, 

hum of rapid heart beat, chlamydia,

the histories of all these     men squirming in me 

& I’m on Facebook trying           to contact you again. 

Shouldn’t I                                      know what I am? 

I’m not enough for designations or grapes 

or the redness of your knees, your tallness, 

the skin stretched over       bone or all these other 

men who keep       distracting me like traffic lights 

or bathtub plugs, the buoy floating in cum, 

wave after wave         of embarrassment. 

I am furtive with doctors, 

forthright when I need a cure, 

& shrinking when I’m asked                about risk.

I’m tuned to a chorus of typical behaviors. 

I keep notes about myself in a red bookbag. 

I know red lights & stop signs trigger me

& I go running to the closest bed,

the bull’s  sudden corrida. 

After breakfast my hair was curling into horns 

but it was just the cow      lick of my shadow, 

post-Halloween when I sold myself 

to a Belgian dressed as a pimp.

Consecrating my lips to her,

I dated a satanist who held my wrists

& cried because he wouldn’t let me cum.

Why was I  sleeping on satin sheets

with someone who collected knives, 

who cursed his lovers to die in ruined buildings, 

whose friends make sketchy remarks 

about the brown-skinned? 

& I’m trapped 

writing about meth heads 

that gifted me a palace of penicillin shots, 

that stretch of lonely road

from my part-time to the clinic, 

making me rue the days I used  motels

with an old    rubbery man in a jock      strap 

who kisses me like a cold sausage link. 

Because I need a magnet. 

Because I’m never content. 

Nothing hurts me 

like when we go back to strangers, 

to when I’m na                ked & rankled.

I sit on my bed & read The Carnal Prayer Mat. 

In it, Weiyangsheng 

can’t stop sleeping with women

no matter how hard he tries

& because he sees everything

the God of my cock begins to laugh

at my jaunt up the cracked stairs

of a hoo      ker’s apartment,

how I’m caught between the seeds 

of another Treponema epidemic 

so soon after escaping the psych ward, 

meditation being 

one of all my failed treatments, 

triggering a bout of pure OCD, 

urging me to shove

an umbrella in someone

& to press the button

making them bloom

all fleshy & fiercely.

What does an umbrella in a pussy 

have to do with me, I whispered, 

scared it would be a permanent  date

with the wound that begat me. Mother, 

I need to be a grapefruit      apart from you. 

Heterosexuals are so degrading. 

They can’t even hear my cries 

unless I’m chanting from the other room how I’m a buggery,

a pandora of virus  & exoticized palms

shucking the coconut of a football player

who tells me my ass is     like Beyonce’s. 

& since a thing’s value is not the time it lasts, 

but the intensity with which it occurs, I’m chanting

to call down his cum & all that would arrest him.

I tape record it all, the intensity of my love-starved mouth 

when the lights are off & I only see you & the flicker 

of that time I fucked a trucker & slept with 17 men

following that Jewish boy to Cali.

Thousand Oaks was the site of my attempt at maiming,

his tires greeting my head on the driveway

where I was sleeping like a tau cross 

waiting to be kissed & I remember,

in the hundred degrees emanating,

how the stars reflected the sad pieces of succotash I am,

how the heat made me succulent for ants,

kept me awake at night,

my genitals a bleeding bougainvillea in my bed’s ever rustling.

I go weak for Russians, Ukrainians,

those hypnotists who make my dick stand up.

Still what dances across my head are the rivulets of your hair

& the dramatic crack

                                                               of light from the bathroom we left soaking,

feet moistening the carpets, our condensation on the rich blue tiles

& the door closing like the sunset on our silhouettes,

two men hanged, a tarot card   or a flower.

It was intimate & a climax, wide open & then

“Shh! We have neighbors” & then “Shh! I can’t love you—I have a boy                       friend”

& even when we did try to love again our intimacy was ruined by gonorrhea.

O painter, I wanted to learn your secret       borscht recipe

but we kept getting interrupted, & it’s like this, with the men I desire.

The best of them are staked                 territories living their lives 

and yet I’m still      putting whiskey in her husband’s hand, 

practicing my old habit of changing Valerie into a dragon 

& fitting her husband into a pink leotard.

O Val, I’m paying a platoon of faggots to take you into the  wings,

so I can steal the corsage off your husband, eyes crusted after drinks, 

when his mind wakes up like a city for me.

In the meantime, I’m still strumming his leg hair like fiddle strings

& when I put them in the drawer after hours of huffing them,

at least the gym sock staleness of the poppers

aren’t bothering me all nights as I’m ordering more, 

preparing myself for another brainstorm of hurt 

but this time I’m adding Gun Oil to my cart,        for better slippage 

& Uber trips to sketchy parts of Newark between two & six.

When a husband is looking for a threesome I say,

“Yes, I possess a mouth such as hers: red, petulant, brutally

 pouting,” & of course I’m supposed to be                 writing

but all day I’m staining an island & paying with lost copies of myself,

every finger sucking this nun         chuck, this blind worm, 

burnt bratwurst, my hard, half-hanging curtain rod,

this purring Vesuvius of seared cock, erupting in New York 

or Phoenix, cities I learn to judge by how beautiful its 30 year olds are. 

The friends I make fuck me so hard I fear I’ll live

the rest of my life with a colostomy bag,

white shirt shit-stained              sainted              a halo of flies- 

Remember, I was little, I was naked, I was choked, 

I was stealing an old man’s poppers 

& held up by my neck against a gray      door.

Walking the Condoms 

I smelled                                           those condoms                              taking them out of the trash

every two or three days                 latex clean but still                         smelling like you 

a bright hibiscus.                             I rode them across                        my tongue until 

my breath stank.                             I imagined my tongue                   incubating 

inside you                                        a prickling blue myrtle                   cactus /// wrong 

it was all wrong                            I smoked too much                        it was my complicity 

of smoking darts                            now lighting                                   the earth 

as it happened in Ojai                   every lung cell                                 trapped like burning peonies. 

My santa ana’s                               fire whisked                                      its illness 

across the scars of                        your cells                                          but look at me now 

teething myself                              across your living lips,                   suckling for something 

crimson                                           & trundling—                                   give me all the sugar

darling and I will go                      crawling                                           over the reckless trellises

to this plague                                 that spits out                                   the lemon juice, 

scared & burnished                      & darkly laudanum.                      Fate is waiting 

a Jackson Pollock                          of calcium spots.                          to sing notes about U 

in CVS                                              mainly U=U                                    or cancer maybe 

or maybe the pubes                     falling off like patches                 of another clown’s hair. 

Why is it                                           my science keeps pickling         new cocks in a jar? 

Keeps desiring                               its cradle                                        of whimpering 

nutrient                                            dense angels                                made of huesos and welts? 

& some god                                    of rawness in the mix                   haunted with gloves 

and insects—                                  ballistic missiles                           in his shaft? 

A god made of                               puckering tangerine                   skin tags 

cigarette slim                                 with index tapping                       the side of a vial 

his tongue                                       a bitter bacterial                         vibraphone 

lined                                                 with a minefield                            of dog shit. 

I didn’t                                              expect such a smoke-               filled night 

so                                                       repetitious                                    with tinkering 

Love Poem to Integration in the Rust Belt

Notes 

“The Ghost Who Listens” — “the making of bodies from flesh, into fungible commodities…” was quoted from Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being. “A poem is not a teddy bear,” is a line from Dear Claudia, Tony Hoagland’s response to Claudia Rankine’s letter about race.

“Death Spasm” — Before succumbing to madness, Nietzsche dug his hands into a horse’s mane to save it from a whipping, and spirochetes are the cork-screw shaped bacterial bodies of Treponema Pallidum (otherwise known as Syphillis).

“Pompeii Revisited”— “Yes, I possess a mouth such as hers: red, petulant, brutally pouting” is quoted from Essex Hemphill’s poem “Heavy Breathing.” “A thing’s value is not the time it lasts, but the intensity with which it occurs” is a quote by Miguel de Unamuno.