Accident
Aug 22 2026
They called it an accident.
As if the collision happened
like an egg
slipping from my hand,
an act of God
while something distracted him.
No lapse in attention.
No one at fault.
No alcohol involved.
But like an unintended birth
and the accidental child,
the consequence
will last a lifetime.
Words have meaning.
Twisted metal and broken glass
are real.
Accidents
only feel that way.
Nevertheless, shit happens.
And even if the intersection in time and space
defied the odds
it can
if the smallest chance exists.
And you thought snake eyes
were a long shot
at 1 in 36!
But didn’t Einstein say
God does not play dice with the universe;
that a thing could be in 2 places
at the same time
offended his ordered mind.
Not mine,
imagining it possible
I might have been somewhere else
that very instant,
a quantum particle
behaving illogically
Einstein or not.
So is it an accident
that someone as methodical as me,
who’d gamble
on only sure things,
still somehow lost?
A poem for the pedant in me. And this is one of my many pet peeves. Which may not strike you as worth belabouring, but at least I relished the challenge of turning a pedantic pet peeve into a poem!
Although I would never have written this if I hadn’t seen this article:
I like precision in language. Words have meaning. So I’ve come to be very particular about this distinction. Highway collisions are not accidents. Something went wrong, somebody failed, there is almost always fault.
A collision is not a little whoopsy. And the consequences are real.
The last line, though, introduces a contrary note. Because the subject of the poem did lose, despite doing everything possible to protect himself. So is perfect control an illusion? Are we not subject to randomness, which is just another way of saying accident? I don’t mean fate — as in predetermined, or some kind of personal destiny — and not God watching over us, but sheer happenstance. Of course control is a conceit. Of course there are accidents. Shit happens, after all.
In the case of collisions, though, most aren’t.
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