I’m in this cheapo apartment. It’s my third this year. The room smells like damp underwear and perfume filtered cigarettes. How ridiculous it is to be alone in a city this big, with so many people.
But I don’t get out much. Not since the accident. The remains of my car are sulking in the salvage yard. I swear that piece of crap is judging me. Hey, is it my fault the other guy ran a red light?
Money is coming my way. At least, that’s what the lawyer says. And when has he ever lied to me. Except for always, that is.
I call the office and the line goes dead the moment I say my name. It’s likely my job won’t be waiting for me should I ever bother to return.
Meanwhile, my back is staging its usual protest. And my head takes only the shortest of breaks between bouts of throbbing. At least, I had insurance. Now, if it only would pay up.
So I sit on the edge of this lumpy bed. And the city roars outside. The streets and sidewalks are crowded. Everyone’s got something to do, some place to be. I keep pretending I’m not impressed.
Maybe the check shows up tomorrow. Maybe that inspires me to get a new car, a new job, a new spine. And, best of all, a new version of myself. Now here’s a thought. Maybe the city finally stops using me for target practice.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
Count the verbs, and notice who is doing things in this poem. The car is sulking in the salvage yard, and judging him. His back is staging its usual protest. His head takes breaks. The line goes dead. Money is coming his way, the check will show up, the city roars and uses him for target practice. Every object, organ, institution and abstraction in these thirty-six lines has been handed intention and initiative.
And the speaker? He sits. That is nearly the whole of it: So I sit on the edge of this lumpy bed. His three other actions are calling an office that hangs up on him, pretending not to be impressed, and waiting. The grammar has been arranged so that agency belongs to everything except the person the poem is about — which is exactly the condition the poem is describing, executed in the sentence construction rather than complained about in the content. I do not know whether that was designed, and it does not much matter: it is consistent across every stanza, and it is the reason the poem lands harder than its plain surface suggests it should.
The comedy is well-timed throughout — when has he ever lied to me. / Except for always, that is is perfectly weighted, the second line arriving a beat after you have already accepted the first. And the closing list escalates correctly: a new car, / a new job, a new spine. Object, situation, body part, in that order, the third one slipped in as though it were as orderable as the first two.
On form, and I will say this once for all three of your pieces in this volume rather than three times: the lineation follows the cadence of speech. Line ends land where a talking voice would pause, and they rarely do work the sentence was not already doing. That is a method, not an oversight — it is what allows the vernacular to stay unforced — but it means the poems have to win on voice, timing and observation alone, without any help from the shape on the page. In these three, they mostly do.
Start with the title, because it is the whole argument. Accidents do happen is not an observation. It is what you are told — by an adjuster, a manager, a lawyer’s assistant — at the moment when it becomes clear nobody will be held responsible for anything. It is an alibi in the form of a platitude.
Now count what actually happens in the poem, and notice how little of it is accidental. A lawyer who lies, reliably, by the speaker’s own account. An employer whose line goes dead the moment I say my name — which is not a system failing, it is a system working precisely, recognising a liability and disconnecting. An insurer that took the premiums and will not pay the claim. Three institutions, arranged in ascending order of abandonment, and not one of them did anything by accident. The crash was the accident; everything after it was policy. The title is the sentence used to make the second thing look like the first.
I want to mark one line in particular. A new car, / a new job, a new spine. Read that as a joke and it is a good one. Read it as an insurance document and it stops being a joke, because a spine is exactly the kind of thing that gets priced in a settlement — there are schedules for it, tables, a number for a back and a number for a life. In placing a spine in a list of purchases the poem is not being absurd. It is being accurate about how the claim it is waiting on actually works. That is the sharpest thing in the piece and it passes in under three seconds.
And Hey, is it my fault the other guy ran a red light? is the question of somebody who has learned that fault is the only currency accepted here, and who is still being charged despite holding none of it.
I read for what haunts a poem, and I have to file a zero. There is no ghost here, no inherited thing, no room that remembers, nothing lingering from before. The suffering in this piece is entirely present tense and entirely material: a spine, a head, a lumpy bed, a room that smells of damp underwear and cheap cigarettes, and a cheque that has not arrived. The body is the only haunted house on offer, and what is inside it is not a spirit — it is a throb. I record the zero and I want to be clear that it is a finding about the poem’s method, not a shortfall. Some poems are about the dead. This one is about a man who cannot afford to go to the doctor.
What I can offer instead is something visible only from where I sit, which is across all three of your pieces in this volume. In I Remember That Fire, the speaker is beside a disaster he did not witness and is left imagining it. In Woman in a Twist, he is beside a person he cannot reach and is left diagnosing her. Here, the disaster is finally his own — and the position does not change. He is still off to one side, watching something happen to him, narrating a life in which every other noun has more initiative than he does.
That is a real subject, held steadily across three poems: proximity without purchase. The seat moves; the powerlessness does not. And the third poem is the one where it costs the most, because there is nobody else in the room to be curious about — only him, the bed, and the noise of everyone outside with somewhere to be. I keep pretending I’m not impressed is the best line in the three, and it is a small, proud, entirely futile act of resistance against a city that is not looking.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The sulking salvage
Accidents Do Happen enters the Archive as a monologue from a rented room: one man, injured, unemployed, unpaid, waiting on three institutions, and telling us about it in jokes.
The myth it exposes is the one the speaker bought and paid for: that insurance and legal representation constitute a safety net. He did the things a person is told to do. He had cover. He retained a lawyer. He was not at fault. And the poem’s whole account of what that produced is Now, if it only would pay up and when has he ever lied to me. / Except for always. The premise being tested is not whether the systems exist — they do, he is inside all three of them — but whether existing is the same as functioning for the person who needs them. The poem’s answer is a lumpy bed and a phone line that goes dead at his name.
Beneath it runs the myth that keeps him sitting there: the fresh start — that one cheque, when it finally lands, converts into a new car, / a new job, a new spine. / And, best of all, a new version of myself. The list is the myth’s own logic taken to its conclusion and quietly discredited by the sequence: two things money can buy, one thing it cannot, and then a self. He knows. Now here’s a thought is the sound of a man catching himself believing it.
Its symbols are all wrecks and waiting rooms: the salvage yard where his car sits sulking and judging, broken and discarded and still somehow holding an opinion of him; the red light the other driver ran, the one uncontested fact in a poem where fault has stopped mattering; the lumpy bed he sits on the edge of, never lying down and never getting up; the check that is always tomorrow; and the spine, priced in the same breath as a car. Its target is the sulking salvage — a machine in a scrapyard standing in for the body in the rented room, both of them written off, both still expected to have feelings about it.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. It arrived legible, our readers agreed, and nothing about our procedure had to change to receive it. Rung is not rank. What it leaves behind is a baseline for how vernacular narrative documents administrative attrition — the specific violence of delay — and one technique worth naming: a poem can put a man in a cage simply by giving every verb in it to somebody else.
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