No One Counts the Bodies Jesus Walked Past

Kensington spreads its legs— lets the city crawl in, dripping Xylazine / fentanyl / tranq, open sore veins moaning dirty dirges. False prophets— all piss and panic— bark half-lies through decaying molars, fingering apathy for spare change. You smell it five blocks before you enter. The stench tests your soul before it reaches your throat. Narcan. burnt spoons. street toilet. Dreams twitch under heat lamps— larval things too stubborn to die. Hope? Hope’s a half-smoked, laced Newport balanced on a baby’s lip next to a trash fire named Jesus— too high for resurrection, too forgotten for a siren. Last week: a girl— breasts bare, pants soaked, her eyes rolled white like God unplugged her mid-sentence. No one stopped. Not the bus. Not the clouds. Not even the man who stepped over her like lint on his pressed Sunday best. And me— I didn’t stop. didn’t even swallow. I watched, one hand buried in my coat, the other holding a prayer that never made it past the flicker of a piss-warm lamppost. Self-excoriation, performed in the dark— a private ritual, scraping shame into the marrow of my thin-sin skin. There’s a church on the corner. Padlocked. Its sign flaps like a dying wing: SUNDAY: ALL WELCOME. It’s Thursday. She won’t make it to Sunday. Behind Rite Aid, a boy slumps— Spider-Man backpack, veins dammed sewer pipes. The sidewalk tucks him in with spite, gravel, and the excrement of things that used to be dignity. piled like human detritus in the shadow of convenience. A needle juts from his neck like a crooked antenna, tuned to some final station where deliverance never broadcasts. What kind of God lets the body rot— weeping pus— before the soul opens its eyes? What kind of city whitewashes grief with slogans no one reads on walls no one dares to touch? I brought bread. blankets. verses I thought could raise the dead. They ate them like roaches. rats. mouths numb— rats the size of cats. Grace— a broken syringe on the altar of already-too-late. This isn’t pretty poetry. This is splatter— brain-matter curdling into blood. This is an elegiac psalter etched in body waste on a Campbell’s soup can’s rusted belly. This is communion through a needle. “Thy kingdom come”— scratched in fecal blood behind Family Dollar. And the miracle? Not salvation. Not even survival. It’s her— two blocks down, still humming something like a lullaby for desecrated corpses, as she trades her last dollar for an hour of dissolving, drifting in her collapsing, gangrenous, abscessing veins. And me— I didn’t come to write this. I came— to what? yes— to what? to scream until my throat bled bloody mercy? But I gagged. Like always. Like we all do. Instead, I write— because I’ve seen angels trying to fly with wings wrapped in devil-black foil. And you— reader of tragedy, ghost-scroller, voodoo of comfort— you’ll blink. scroll. you’ll bless this poem with your silence or a comment like “that’s enough.” You’ll sip brandy, setup a lunch date sanitize your hands, call it brave. Say someone should help. But not you. No. Never you. If it were your daughter on these broken and brutal streets— shirtless, soul-prone, boils blooming like blasphemous flowers— would you still scroll past? Zoom closer. See that infection reflection? That’s you— stepping over her. a daughter. That’s your shadow— nodding off beside the boy. a son. fading. degrading. slobbering. snotting. Soon— police chalked in sidewalk. That’s your apathy badly tattooed on every necrosis-cracked spine curled in a god-forsaken alleyway. That was your mercy. And it festered your birthright as it died. There’s a needle in your reflection too. Only yours— was filled, brimming anesthetic apathy in the synapses of unremembering.