Since Nothing Much Happens to You

There’s no weirder property

Of first-person existence

Than how probability

Distorts around specific

Perspective—so many things

Amount to dead certainty

As events that must happen

But that are vanishingly

Unlikely to involve you.

This goes for the good and bad,

Although your biases sense

It’s all biased against you.

Once your life is specified,

All sorts of things disappear

From real possibility

Then happen to someone else—

Things which will and must happen

Inevitably somewhere

To someone. Never to you.

Live a long life and something

Indeed weird may befall you,

Lightning strike or lottery,

And that will be the one time,

Maybe, that what had to be

Had to be you and just you.

Specify anyone else

In advance, in that case, no.

Specify even yourself,

Whom the weird thing happened to,

In advance and also, no,

Not hardly, hardly likely.

Inevitability

Eschews the first-person view,

Which makes it impossible

To comprehend extinction’s

Certainly coming for you.