car wreck with a casket truck in poetry

You always have a choice.
Don’t always have a perfect choice
but you always have a choice.
Oh Christ, sometimes nothing’s nice
you choose between two awful things
but you still gotta choose.
You still get to choose.

And sometimes life just happens
and sometimes life doesn’t happen anymore
and sometimes you’re on the highway and
the casket truck almost crashes into you
and when you turn out not to be dead
all you can do is make the joke that
if you had died
they had better not made your family
pay for your goddamned box.
That’s a choice too.

You can joke that had the casket truck
swerved a little harder to the left
everyone could’ve said you’d
almost turned it around and
you’d have a ready-made excuse
“Oh, he was almost there.”
“He’d almost finished this or that.”
“If not for the fucking casket truck.”
But here you are
having survived the highway and
you’re stuck finding out what’s next
after a sigh and a dark little joke.
Those are choices much as anything.

You always have a choice.
I guess until you don’t.
But we’re not there yet.
We get to see what’s next.