Irrelevation

“it all happened so fast” and though he’d heard
all about time slowing down at
such times it wasn’t so much that
as it got very full—

when the truck’s front grill
slammed the pine trunk, didn’t think No
or holy Fuck or even Not Yet—

as the left headlight
shattered sparked glass
into the black and bark
he knew
he was going to die

and his life never “flashed before his eyes”
with less than seconds of it left,
but the curious jolt of being reminded—

—time that damn-fool Blake
talked him into that bungie thing—

—diving off the high boatdocks
at Beudreaux’s, that moment—

and what did shoot like a load of buckshot
through his head as everything in the truck kept moving at
sixty-miles per except the truck itself
was the surprising Anything is possible—

because nowhere in his head did it say
this could every happen—if this what the hell
else was possible?

—deer could leap cowlike over moons and
out of the paths of oncoming trucks—

—babies grow angel-wings
and sing elvis flying through the air and—

—the other lives: country singer
artist doctor soldier saint stunt-driver serial-killer—

the half-moment when his head and the shatter-
-proof glass burst in a halo of cracks—before
his skull stopped moving at sixty miles per hour
but everything in it kept right on into the inner
windshield of is skull—didn’t think
so this was it so much as I could have been anything


(from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2001)