You’d have to be crazy to leave a gig like this;
The hours, the holidays, the civil-service tenure,
And it was crazy that got me here in the first place.
Of course, you knew the guy who was here before me—
Almost twenty years in the job; Christ almighty,
That’s pretty much a lifetime of doughnut consumption—
Anyway, almost twenty years here before he offed himself.
Being a sub-registrar for a couple of years, I got to know him
At least a little bit, which is about all I wanted to, thank you much.
“The dead cast long shadows,” he used to say,
Though Lord only knows what in hell that meant,
And every once in a while he’d talk about
How he couldn’t go to calling hours for friends and acquaintances
Where he’d signed the death certificate—he said it was
As if he’d killed them himself, and one time he showed
A birth certificate from the thirties, where the child had
Only a last name—“What the hell happened to this child?”
And he was damn near yelling, for chrissakes,
“He had a life—he laughed, cried, held his mother
At night. Where is his name? Where is the record?”
As loopy as a rat who’s had a D-Con sundae, he was.
Apparently, he couldn’t leave work at work, either;
Word was his wife left him, couldn’t keep the dead separate
From the living, so the word on the street was.
When he took himself out, the ambulance boys said he made
Such a damned mess they took him out of the house in two trips.
Well, crazy is as crazy does I guess—
I’m running for more joe; you need anything?