“You Will Never See it Coming”

 1969

  

On a Greyhound bus, traveling, only countryside and impatience and on the shoulder of the road stands a large black crow.  No sooner has the bus passed him but I am him, there, standing, totally oblivious to the tons of steel streaming and screaming by only a foot or inches away. Then I snap back to my seat, inside, traveling once again and I begin to wonder how much is rushing by me all the time only inches, or millions of an inch, or seconds or some other measurement I do not even know and I oblivious to it all?

Cosmic rays from distant star explosions, radio waves from the local country music station, the gazillion neutrinos passing through my body every millisecond, bacteria, viruses, the tectonic plates of parallel universe(s) shifting, some misshape of the space we are traveling through, some mutation of a single cell deep within the brain or lung or, fate, or destiny or, of course, the will of God.

“Be careful, watch out”, I am told and how exactly do I do that when any one move, any one action, any one step, may put me out on that “road”, directly inline for the next Greyhound and I not even aware the road exists or the Greyhound?

And so in the end, I appears that one just will never see it coming no matter how sharp our eyes might be or how much we know, or how good or bad a person we may be.  It is there, right there, all around us and there is no safe way to turn or place to be. We are all on some shoulder somewhere oblivious and “We will never see it coming”.