Survivor’s Guilt
I walk the long neon artery of memory,
42nd flickering like a bad confession,
your laugh still ricocheting off the brick
like a subway train that never learned how to stop—
we were kings of nothing, remember?
paper pockets, dollar slices,
cheap coffee that tasted like burnt prophecy,
and the Staten Island ferry—our ocean liner—
cutting gray water into temporary freedom,
wind slapping our faces awake,
you shouting at gulls like they owed you rent.
Manhattan was a fever then—
we danced inside it,
sweat and bass and bodies orbiting desire,
club lights baptizing us electric, immortal—
afterward the pilgrimage downtown,
meatpacking nights,
where shadows leaned into each other
and names didn’t matter,
only the pulse, the heat,
the brief forgetting of morning.
You burned brighter than all of it—
a flare against the dark rumor spreading
through veins, through whispers, through hospital sheets—
we joked about everything except the silence
that grew heavier each week
until your voice became a hallway
I couldn’t follow.
Now the city hums without you
like a jukebox missing its best song.
I pass the ferry and don’t board.
I pass the clubs and don’t descend.
My body—once a map of restless hunger—
folds itself into corners,
refuses the old rituals of pursuit.
What is desire when it outlives its witness?
What is skin without the echo of your laughter
dragging it toward the next reckless night?
I carry you like an unpaid debt—
every breath a receipt I never asked for.
You should be here,
arguing with strangers,
flirting with ghosts,
stealing another dawn.
Instead it’s me—
walking, always walking,
through streets that remember too much,
through nights that offer too little,
alive
with the terrible persistence
of someone who didn’t deserve
to be the one who stayed.
— Adam Donaldson Powell
FOR THE BOYS (with AIDS).
To friends who don’t know
and strangers who don’t care,
soldiers of love worship
tinsel-town sex goddesses
with all their strength.
They thrive outwardly on
the rantings of Madonna and
privately soothe their pain
and hopelessness with somber
strains by Leonard Cohen.
Their greatest ambition is
to shake the shackles of shame
which imprison and threaten
them with the most undignified
fate of all: namelessness.
To some there is no irony in death,
but others are enraged at the
uncanny plight of these handsome
living dead whose only crime was
need for love and recognition.
— Adam Donaldson Powell
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