A few years ago I was having breakfast in a restaurant in Grants, NM.  Guy at the next table and I got to talking.

He's a man who makes his living traveling around cleaning up after particularly nasty suicides.  Good paying job, evidently, and something of a specialty not everyone wants to mess with.  He was there for the Santa Fe Railroad taking care of a Navajo who'd offed himself by lying down with his head on a railroad track.

This was the offspring of that conversation:

Industry

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Tasteless and inconsiderate.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.

Lawsuits, insurance forms
Police reports
Accident investigation
For a non-accident.
Clerks, cops, lawyers
Funeral directors
Morticians, newsmen

And the little guy.

Someone has to clean
The brain and bloodstains
From the walls and carpets;
Pick the bone fragments
Out of the doorframe
With a pair of needle nosed
pliers;

Plug the holes, re-paint.
Mop up those
Sidewalk body fluids
Untangle the lariat
Or phone cord
From the light fixture
Scrub bathtub
Crimson rings.

Someone has to
manufacture
Sleeping pills
Bullets
Razorblades
Ropes.

And hospital beds
For the faint-of-hearts
And near misses.

Some of that's still
Made in America
(Damned good quality, too,
I'm proud to say)
It's hard times.

A man has to go where the
work is.

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Tasteless and inconsiderate.
What a waste, I say.

No real mess to clean up.
It keeps people employed
It's commerce.

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright©2003 Jack Purcell