Just Passin' Thru', Mate

We used to drink ourselves silly going down to have breakfast in the restaurant to catch the news of the Asian Tsunami thinking to ourselves, when it is time for you to go down, you go down good. I've seen colleagues with blood gushing out of their ears and eyeballs, gasping for air trying to tell me something I couldn't make head or tail of, went down with a violent jerk as if trying to hold on right to the last minute the life he had fought so hard to live the best he could making a living as roughnecks on an oil rig in the open sea, or a lonely rig in the middle of a desert in a country so rich in oil the citizens got paid monthly for idling themselves silly.

Just passin' thru', mate.

There were bodies I've seen, burnt to the bones with dangling eyeballs waiting to be washed on a steel table. Their mothers haven't got the news that their sons won't be coming home this Christmas. Somewhere in Oslo a little girl waited for daddy to come home with chocolate and Barbie, the mother is probably in the kitchen figuring out how how to surprise hubby with a nice filling for this year's turkey. Both of them would know soon that daddy is on the steel table somewhere in the middle of a desert, his entire manly frame reduced to a heap of coal. Daddy's coming home all right. In a box.

Just passin' thru', mate.

Rescue boats in a violent storm. Four men in orange and yellow suits calculating the wave patterns to fish out a body out of the water. Men overboard! Men overboard! The chief shouting at the top of his lungs in the storm and you stop work to look out for a friend you've had coffee with this morning joking among ourselves how pretty women were when your head is full of gin, tonic and lager. He won't joke no more with us tonight. He in the water, white as ghost, eyes open as if still thinking of the women.

Just passin' thru', mate. Just passin' thru' before going down.