They’d been chatting, all idle, face ahead,
maybe about a restaurant they hoped to go to,
or a couple they had met.
His foot on the pedal, racing not braking:
speeded-up tunnel of blurred sides meshing,
merging, blending to only one fixed point ahead –
the intersection.
Hoping no one would come, his foot gropes for the right place,
a scream from his partner,
his own sickened groan,
but there’s no straight,
it’s T and shop window,
a slowed down second waiting for the smash.
No time for a flash-by of life’s key moments:
what nonsense to think this ever was true –
just the fractured thought of the stupidity of it all.