How Are You Never Going To Be Late?

Early on in the first season of The Wire, Avon takes D'Angelo to see an older relative in hospital, a man who must have lived in the same violent world as the pair of cousins, the younger a lieutenant in the older's drug empire. We come to know that he must have lived in this world because just before the camera draws in to reveal a healed bullet wound on his forehead, Avon says that the comatose man frightens him because his fate shows that the world they inhabit cannot be lived in forever: you only need to be "a little slow, a little late" once. That's by way of explaining the post title; not much more.

On The Counterfactual

Deadening metaphysics are,
simply, and so no beginning.
Let them mock us then, and start there.

How little subtlety there is
in observing that time passes.
A brute fact, with a distinct lack
of alchemy, of a soft touch,
poppy-petal light, skin on skin.

It has instead a discipline
A brutal self-reliance, hard
like blows to the back of the skull.

Consider reaching beyond it;
Stepping in the same river twice
And the strange tyranny
Of its impossibility.
Yet how the prospect beguiles.

To bathe in last year’s ancient rains,
To have them drawn back from the sea
And so pass out of things’ passing.

Outside endurance, enchantment,
And inside enchantment, nowhere
Endlessly left to twist tighter,
Doubling back, and again,
Ever watching each thing's leaving.