WILD CARD

Imagine your whole professional life
decided in one single second.
Imagine your year’s work of office work
rendered a success or failure
by a single supervisor’s report.
How cruel this world must seem
if futures are based on a single flip of the coin,
a single roll of the dice.
A chance encounter, a misstep off a curb,
a scratch of a lottery ticket –
all individual haphazard events
cast outside the parameters of a designed plan.
The wrong turn at the fork,
the sudden hamstring pull,
the loss of a race by a hundredth of a second.
Are we just the product of happenstance,
fortunes determined by the vagaries of a single incident?
Life, not as an overall body of work,
but made up of irrevocable
and unconnected starburst moments.
Is this fair in life, or in baseball?
Shouldn’t we at least play two out of three?