‘Accidents Happen’: A Poem by Shaun C. Duncan

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Accidents Happen

We’re told time tends toward catastrophe,
And that a butterfly’s ephemeral wings
Might quake the sky somewhere across the sea
By strange cascades of simple happenings,
Arousing thus a violent hurricane;
Which is to say that no one really knows
Just how or why occurrences occur,
But we see patterns, from which we infer
Some order governs whether the wind blows
This way or that, a logic which, made plain,
Might thus at last reveal we suffer naught in vain.

I never knew him, nor did learn his name,
But once the wind died down word got around,
For martyrdom is worthless without fame,
And if by chance that gum had gone to ground
Without a soul beneath, who would ask why?
Instead, for one brief moment we forgot
Ourselves, imagining the crush of steel,
And how a man might wait behind the wheel
In perfect ignorance of life’s cruel plot,
Dreaming of paltry toys he’ll never buy,
And all the while believing he will never die.

We thanked the stars his kids weren’t in that car
But words mean nothing when you’re all alone,
And silver linings seem at best bourgeois
When all that’s sweet is sown in blood and bone;
For even then it seemed their lot was worse:
Condemned to play their parts upon this stage
When they had learned the theatre is deserted,
And fairy tales were writ to be subverted—
For what are they but stains upon a page?
Oh, how our platitudes must sound perverse
When what once seemed precious gift betrays its curse.

Soon every orphan’s anguish was our own,
For all the world, it seemed, was fatherless,
While living was to fall just like a stone
Dropped from on high, a dream of weightlessness
So rudely interrupted when we hit the floor;
But, from such angst, a rum exhilaration
Transfigured all to fields of living fire
So that, with neither loathing nor desire,
We glimpsed with borrowed eyes a chaste creation,
And pitied all we’d hated just before,
While those we loved, we loved right then a little more.

We might have walked on water, had we dared,
And for a fleeting span our slightest gesture
Reverberated such that each repaired
Another rent in nature’s tattered vesture,
As kindness paid for kindness, grace for grace,
And maybe we’d have found our paradise
Were gravity not such a ceaseless bitch,
And such sweet sentiments so prone to kitsch,
But soon we fell to apathy and vice
And broke away from quiddity’s embrace
To sulk within cocoons of calloused commonplace.

I know the best of me some bastard day
Shall rise once more upon its blood-black wings,
For accidents are never far away,
And none can know what woe each turning brings,
But, had I courage, I might cow my lips
To beg a quietus so stupefying,
So rich and senseless as to soothe the hurt
Of every wretched soul condemned to dirt;
For dying is much easier than trying
When selfish suns by mourning might eclipse,
And, given grief enough, birth grief’s apocalypse.

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Shaun C. Duncan is a picture framer and fine art printer who lives in Adelaide, South Australia.