"Murder Story," A Weird Catastrophe Poem

With thanks to "Mustache" Joe, wherever you are now.

                                         Murder Story

               There’s an opera company in
                     northern Utah
                where I worked for a summer.

    I worked there with a carpenter from Alabama
  who was an ambulance driver in
         a past life.

“So how’d you get to being a carpenter,” I asked him.

Well after a while as a paramedic I started to
     not value human life so much anymore. So I thought,
  hey I should probably get out of this. That, and we
weren’t really helping people. We’d either get calls for a 
baby with a fever or we were there just to
    clean up the mess.

But what really did it for me was we got a call one time 
and we got to this house and this guy had shot
himself and his three kids. 
His kids were in a car in the driveway and he was on a 
couch in the house. And the way it was, 
we could’ve saved him but we couldn’t 
do anything for the kids. So we dragged him out into
the driveway and we made him watch us as we tried to 
save the kids. He would keep turning his head away and 
so we put a boot to his face to make him watch.

“Jesus,” I said.
“That’s like war.”

Yeah, it was a bit like playing god. 
So I got out of it.
    
And now I work in theatre.