The poet never planned on becoming a collector of incidents. He thought poetry would be a clean profession, like arranging stones in a river until they spelled a feeling, or holding a mirror up to the moon and asking it politely to explain itself. He did not know, at first, that poems arrive the way bruises do—unannounced, blooming overnight, tender when touched, impossible to trace back to one clean moment. The poet learned this slowly, through accidents: spilled drinks, missed exits, wrong names spoken at the wrong time, the peculiar violence of memory arriving exactly when it is least invited.

His earliest incident was language itself. Words fell on him like weather, unpredictable and invasive. Some days they were gentle rain, others hail. He remembers the first sentence that ever wounded him: a teacher saying, You have potential, the way someone says this glass might shatter. From then on, he listened carefully to tone, to the way vowels could smile while consonants sharpened their teeth. He understood that words were never neutral. They were always leaning toward consequence.

The poet grew up in rooms full of noise—televisions arguing with each other, adults rehearsing disappointments, clocks that sounded like insects trapped in boxes. Silence was rare, so he learned to carve it. He would slip away to stairwells, to backyards at dusk, to the hollow between his ribs where nobody else could fit. There, incidents gathered quietly: the smell of cut grass mixing with gasoline, the hum of streetlights warming up, the way loneliness could feel almost holy if you stayed still long enough.

Accidents followed him like stray dogs. He tripped over them. He fed them without meaning to. Once, he fell in love by mistake—thought it was admiration, or curiosity, or the simple gravity between two bodies sharing a bus stop. That accident left a scar shaped like a question mark. Another time, he stayed too long in a job that bored him, mistaking endurance for virtue. That accident left him with a vocabulary of fluorescent lights, break-room coffee, and the particular despair of watching minutes behave like hours.

The poet noticed that incidents were loud when they happened but quiet afterward, while accidents were silent at first and then grew mouths. An incident might be a door slammed, a phone call received at midnight, a sudden laughter that felt inappropriate and therefore necessary. An accident might be the way he started flinching at compliments, or how Sundays began to feel heavier than Mondays. Poetry, he realized, was not about choosing one over the other. It was about admitting both had happened to him.

He wrote wherever the accidents caught him. On receipts, on napkins, on the backs of envelopes addressed to people he no longer spoke to. Ink bled through paper like truth through denial. Sometimes his handwriting shook, not from fear, but from recognition. The body knows when it is being honest, and it rarely cooperates. He learned to forgive himself for messiness. Clean lines, he discovered, often lied.

Color came to him late. For a long time, the poet believed the world was mostly gray, with occasional bursts of red reserved for emergencies. Then one afternoon, while waiting at a crosswalk, he noticed how yellow could feel aggressive, how blue could feel apologetic, how green could ache with patience. From that day on, color became a language he trusted more than grammar. He wrote about bruised purples, jealous oranges, the exhausted beige of office walls, the obscene pink of sunsets that seemed to mock human suffering by being beautiful anyway.

Some incidents were inherited. He carried other people’s accidents in his pockets without knowing it: a grandfather’s silence, a mother’s worry folded into neat squares, a father’s temper that arrived like weather fronts. These were not his faults, but they were his materials. The poet understood that blood is a kind of ink, and family stories stain whatever page they touch. He did not try to wash them out. He wrote around them, through them, sometimes directly into them, letting the page absorb what it could.

Love, when it arrived again, did so clumsily. It knocked over lamps. It misunderstood metaphors. It wanted certainty in a house built of drafts. The poet tried to explain himself, but explanation is a poor substitute for presence. This love became both incident and accident: the meeting intentional, the aftermath chaotic. There were mornings filled with light and coffee and shared silence, and nights where words collapsed under the weight of what they were asked to carry. When it ended, it did not explode. It evaporated, leaving behind a residue the poet kept mistaking for hope.

He wrote that too. He wrote about the way endings rarely announce themselves, how they prefer to slip out the back door while you’re still setting the table. He wrote about the sound of a phone that doesn’t ring, the particular cruelty of “take care,” the way memory edits people into kinder versions of themselves. These poems were quieter, but they lasted longer. They sat in the reader like a held breath.

The poet’s body became another archive of accidents. Knees that predicted rain. A shoulder that remembered a fall from years ago. A heart that skipped not from romance but from anxiety. Doctors offered names. He preferred metaphors. It wasn’t denial; it was translation. Saying my chest is a crowded room felt more accurate than saying stress. Saying my bones are tired of holding me up felt truer than saying fatigue. Poetry did not cure him, but it made him legible to himself.

There were incidents of joy, too, though he trusted them less. A song played at exactly the right moment. A stranger’s kindness delivered without ceremony. A line he wrote that surprised him by being good. These moments felt like gifts left on his doorstep by someone who refused to sign their name. He accepted them cautiously, knowing how quickly joy can turn into expectation, and expectation into resentment. Still, he wrote them down, because gratitude deserves a record.

The poet argued often with purpose. People asked him what his work was for, as if poems were tools meant to tighten bolts or fix leaks. He tried to answer politely. Sometimes he said poems were for survival. Sometimes he said they were for beauty. Sometimes he said they were accidents themselves—collisions between experience and language that left debris worth examining. Most of the time, he smiled and changed the subject. Purpose, he learned, is another word that carries a lot of hidden pressure.

Time behaved strangely around him. Years sped up, days stalled, moments stretched thin as plastic wrap. Incidents aged poorly or beautifully depending on how often he revisited them. Accidents matured like wine or soured like milk left out too long. Memory was not a reliable narrator, but it was persistent. The poet stopped trying to correct it. Instead, he let it speak, knowing that even lies reveal something about desire.

There were periods of silence when he wrote nothing. These were not failures, though they felt like it. They were accidents of depletion. The well does not always refill on schedule. During those times, he lived more. He watched people. He listened. He made mistakes without documenting them. He let incidents pass unharvested. When language returned, it did so ravenous, hungry for everything he had refused to name.

He noticed, eventually, that readers recognized themselves in his accidents more than his incidents. Anyone can relate to a car crash, a breakup, a shouted argument. Fewer people admit to the slow erosion, the unnamed habits, the subtle compromises that shape a life. When someone told him a poem felt too real, he understood it as a compliment and a warning. He had touched something tender. He had described an accident people prefer to call fate.

The poet aged into himself. The urgency softened but did not disappear. He became less interested in being impressive and more interested in being precise. Big words gave way to exact ones. He learned that honesty is not loud. It hums. It vibrates. It waits. Color remained, but it deepened—less neon, more dusk. His poems began to feel like rooms rather than performances, places where a reader could sit without being asked to clap.

In the end—though there is no true end—the poet accepted that his life would never organize itself neatly. Incidents would continue to interrupt. Accidents would keep revealing themselves years after the fact. Poetry would remain an imperfect map of a shifting terrain. This did not depress him. It relieved him. Perfection, he realized, leaves no room for witnesses.

So he kept writing. Not to prevent accidents, not to glorify incidents, but to mark where he had been. Each poem became a small flag planted in the chaos, saying: I was here. This happened. This almost happened. This happened differently than I remember, but I remember it anyway. Color spilled. Language bled. Meaning flickered and held.

And somewhere between the stumble and the stride, between what broke and what survived, the poet found a strange, durable grace—not in control, not in certainty, but in the ongoing willingness to pay attention.

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