Psalm of the Fentanyl Graveyards by Jeff Callaway

Psalm of the Fentanyl Graveyards

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the ground." — Genesis 4:10 (Douay-Rheims)

I.

Lord, I am standing in a Texas parking lot where a nineteen-year-old boy went blue and cold between a dumpster and a shopping cart on a Tuesday.

Nobody put his name on the Dow Jones. Nobody lowered the flag. His mama identified him from his boots.

This is where I am writing this psalm. Not from a sanctuary. Not from behind a pulpit draped in velvet. From the cracked asphalt of forgotten America, where the body count doesn't move the market and the grief doesn't trend and the dead keep piling up like cordwood while the Congress debates and the cartels calculate and the television runs the weather after the break.

God, I am asking You tonight to be the God of the parking lot, not just the cathedral.

II. The Geography of the Dying

Drive east out of Dallas and let the suburbs thin. Let the dollar stores multiply. Let the water towers rust.

Henderson County. Van Zandt County. Gregg County. The Piney Woods boys who came home from jobs that left them, from backs that broke them, from a doctor who handed them a script and a pharmaceutical company that knew exactly what it was doing.

Then the pills ran out. Then the street price tripled. Then a man named nothing to the evening news handed them something blue and pressed and pill-shaped that contained not medicine but a compound fifty to one hundred times stronger than morphine, synthesized in a clandestine laboratory in Sinaloa from chemicals sourced in Wuhan and shipped through channels that boasted in writing — in English — of a one hundred percent customs clearance rate.

This is not an epidemic. An epidemic is a sickness that spreads. This is a supply chain. This is an operation. This is a business model built on the bodies of the forgotten.

Now drive north.

Kentucky. West Virginia. Sixty-nine deaths per one hundred thousand people in a single year, the highest fentanyl death rate in the nation — not a statistic, a decimation, a slow-motion massacre of Appalachian sons and daughters in the hollows where the coal mines closed and the jobs never came back and the church parking lots are where the ambulances go on Saturday nights.

Now go further. Ohio. Indiana. Illinois. The forgotten Midwest where grain elevators stand and towns named after saints bury their children in unhallowed silence while the financial networks argue about quarterly earnings and interest rate projections.

O Lord, how long wilt Thou hold Thy peace? How long wilt the righteous die in parking lots while the unjust prosper in boardrooms and cartel compounds and government hallways with their hands washed clean in the blood of the poor?

III. The Machine That Eats Children

Let me name the machinery so that it does not hide behind abstraction.

Chinese chemical companies — some of them operating out of state-linked facilities, advertising openly on English-language websites, promising stealth, promising delivery, promising American customers that the poison would arrive undetected — shipped the raw ingredients of death by the kilogram.

The Sinaloa Cartel. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel. They took the precursors, pressed them into pills that look like medicine, and moved them north across a border that both parties have used as a fundraising prop for fifty years without solving.

A two-milligram dose kills. Less than a grain of salt. And they pressed it into shapes designed to look like something a doctor prescribed.

Proverbs 21:13 says: He that stoppeth his ear against the cry of the poor, shall also cry himself, and shall not be heard.

Habacuc stood on his watchtower and cried: How long, O Lord, shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? I shall cry out to thee suffering violence, and thou wilt not save. (Habacuc 1:2)

I understand Habacuc now. I am standing in his watchtower. It is a Walmart parking lot in East Texas and the grass grows through the asphalt and the children go blue and nobody comes.

Isaias spoke woe to the lawgivers: Woe to them that make wicked laws: and when they write, write injustice: to oppress the poor in judgment. (Isaias 10:1-2)

I speak it now to every congressman who held a press conference and wrote a bill that went nowhere. To every administration — Republican, Democrat, it does not matter, the party does not absolve the body — that managed this crisis like a constituency to be managed rather than a mass casualty event to be stopped.

IV. What the Catechism Knows

The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not mince words: Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. (CCC 2280)

And this: In the account of Abel's murder by his brother Cain, Scripture reveals the presence of anger and envy in man, consequences of original sin, from the beginning of human history. Man has become the enemy of his fellow man. God declares the wickedness of this fratricide: What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. (CCC 2259)

More than seventy thousand voices cried from the ground in 2023. Closer to fifty thousand in 2024 — a statistical improvement that the press called a victory while the number the size of a small city was still dying in parking lots in Malakoff in Harlan in Chillicothe in Evansville in every forgotten town where dignity goes to be buried without ceremony.

The blood is crying. It does not stop crying just because the count went down.

Gaudium et Spes, proclaimed from the Second Vatican Council, the conscience of the living Church, names it plainly: whatever insults human dignity — subhuman conditions, exploitation, the selling of women and children, the treatment of human beings as tools for profit — these are infamies.

Call the fentanyl trade what it is. An infamy. A deliberate and calculated infamy with a pipeline, with a profit margin, with logistics, with money laundering through casinos in Macau, with shell companies, with cryptocurrency wallets, with Chinese nationals convicted in American courts while their government issued statements condemning the prosecution.

This is not a cultural problem. This is not a poverty problem. This is not a mental health problem — though all of those shadows live inside it.

This is organized murder wearing the face of a pharmaceutical tablet.

V. A Word to the Dead

I am talking to you now.

You who went blue in the parking lot in Malakoff. You who they found in the truck cab in Morgantown. You who your mother kept calling for three days before she used the key.

You who were not a statistic when you were alive, and are not one now just because a government database recorded your exit.

You were made, the Catechism says, in the image and likeness of God. Imago Dei. Not partially. Not provisionally. Completely.

You were someone before the dependency found you. You were someone through it. You were someone in the moment your heart stopped — still someone — still irreplaceable — still a being of infinite value to the God Who made you and Whose face you are now looking into.

I do not pray over your grave and say you deserved this. I will not do that.

I do not know the architecture of your final hour. I know the architecture of the supply chain that manufactured it.

And I am asking God to address that architecture the way He addressed Sodom: with fire and with finality and with the knowledge that He saw and He knows and He does not forget the voice of the blood that rises from the ground.

For he hath not forgotten the cry of the poor. (Psalm 9:12, Douay-Rheims)

VI. The Accusation Against the Nation

What hath America done with the blood of its children?

It argued about stock portfolios. It debated tariff policy. It held hearings where men in suits asked questions of witnesses in suits and nothing changed in the parking lot in Malakoff.

Both parties bear this. I refuse to give either one a saint's medal for managing a graveyard.

The Sinaloa Cartel was declared a foreign terrorist organization in February of 2025. Decades after it began killing Americans. Decades.

The pharmaceutical companies that ignited the first wave of this crisis with OxyContin and opioid prescriptions paid settlements and kept operating. Kept. Operating.

And somewhere in between the lobbyists and the lawyers and the quarterly earnings calls, the nineteen-year-old in the parking lot went blue and did not come back.

Saint John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church, thundered from the pulpit of Constantinople: Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore Him when He is naked. Do not pay Him homage in the temple while neglecting Him outside, where He is cold and ill-clad.

The body of Christ is lying on the cracked asphalt of forgotten America and we are arguing about the Dow Jones.

Woe. I say woe. Not as a liturgical flourish. As an indictment.

Woe to the governments that administered this crisis with the urgency of a committee meeting. Woe to the nations that supplied the chemistry of death and called our prosecution of their executives an act of aggression. Woe to the cartels whose business model is the slow execution of American children. Woe to the churches that stayed comfortable while the parish was dying in the parking lot. Woe to me if I write this psalm and it stays safely inside the walls of the righteous and never finds the ones who need to hear it.

Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and prepareth a city with iniquity. (Habacuc 2:12)

VII. The Cry I Bring Before the Throne

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy.

Not the polite mercy. Not the mercy that asks nothing of You. The mercy that moves. The mercy that turned the tables in the Temple. The mercy that said Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to Me, and meant it with the full weight of eternal consequence.

The children of the poor are dying in parking lots and we are asking You tonight to be wrathful the way You know how to be, the way David begged You to be when his enemies surrounded him and justice seemed to sleep.

Arise, O Lord. Not slowly. Now.

Let the supply chains of death collapse. Let the cartel laboratories burn with the fire of Your justice, not ours, because ours cannot be trusted and Yours cannot be bought.

Let the money launderers find their accounts emptied by a hand they cannot see and cannot bribe and cannot threaten.

Let the politicians who managed this graveyard from a comfortable distance stand before You with clean suits and dirty hands and give account for every name in the database they never learned to say.

And Lord — let the ones who still live addicted and hunted and ashamed in the hollows of West Virginia and the Piney Woods of East Texas and the flat exhausted streets of the forgotten Midwest — let them find the one thing the cartels cannot synthesize, cannot press into a pill, cannot ship across a border:

Your grace.

The only thing stronger than fentanyl is the Blood of Jesus Christ.

I have seen it work. I am living proof that the worst thing in a man's history is not the final word when God speaks into it.

So I am asking You, Lord, for justice on behalf of the dead and mercy on behalf of the living and the courage for this nation — this broken, distracted, arguing nation — to look at the parking lots and the graveyards and the hollows and call it what it is:

A massacre. Slow. Systematic. Manufactured.

And to finally, finally, refuse to look away.

The Lord shall be known when he executeth judgments. (Psalm 9:17, Douay-Rheims)

He will be known.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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