No One Counts the Bodies Jesus Walked Past
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No One Counts the Bodies Jesus Walked Past
Daniel Henry Rodgers
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WARNING
This poem is not meant to shock but to bear witness. What follows is a portrait of addiction as I’ve witnessed it in Kensington, raw, brutal and tragically real. May we read not to judge but to remember that every life matters even the ones we step over. I offer these lines in love and truth because to ignore them would be the greater offense. - Poet
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Come sit down at a cracked diner table in the corner of some stinky dimly lit Philadelphia dive bar, greasy menus retouched, ashtrays full and let me tell you my friend firsthand about Kensington…. honest, visceral, my poet’s dagger turned inward and out. Not for the squeamish or the easily offended, not for pity nor forgiveness. I gave the street its voice and didn’t flinch. Now listen:
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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.
Copyright © Daniel Henry Rodgers | Year Posted 2025
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