My Near Brush With Death, Thursday Afternoon, June 7,2018, The Details: Police Covert Ops In Raleigh, North Carolina Poem by Dennis Ryan

Saturday morning, June 9,2018 at 9: 42 a.m

"For J.L. Austin, it is axiomatic that ‘the occasion of an utterance matters seriously, and that the words used are to some extent to be ‘explained' by the ‘context' in which they are designed to be or have actually been spoken... certain conditions have to be satisfied... the fundamental condition being that those involved in the utterance have to appreciate its force; to appreciate the force of an utterance being... to understand the circumstances in which it is spoken."
--David Herd, "Introduction: John Ashbery's Sense of Occasion", John Ashbery and American Poetry, p.17

I know what I am talking about. This, or something very
much like this has happened before—I didn't immediately
drive forward after stopping at the stop sign at the intersection
of Farmgate Road and Cary Towne Parkway as is my habit,
no, I did not turn the corner; instead, I crept forward, moving
slowly, craning my neck to see around that corner as the view
is obscured by tall conifers, dense forest all along the left-hand
side of Farm Gate Road—I could not see around that corner...
onto Cary Towne Parkway, the direction from which that car
came hurtling past, rushing through that stop sign without stopping, just missing me broadside, my car, by a few feet—
I had sat back; felt my being stir in my body—just as I have written in that poem of two days ago, June 7. My being moved—and it didn't move by chance, by accident, but by cause... Chance? Was it chance?

Timed operations are the heart and soul, the hallmark of police
operations—covert ops in particular—that debilitate, cut short,
end lives, timed-out car "accidents" that occur with alarming
regularity in American cities and towns to eliminate certain targets—ask, if you can, those dissident Lithuanian poets who were killed in Chicago in car "accidents" one after the other during the Cold War—(I am Lithuanian by birth—Baronas by name—on my mother's side of the family, a poet as well, and know their personal histories.) Ask the mainland Chinese math and computer science prodigy who had completed his Ph.D. at North Carolina State University, and had been "living" here, in Raleigh, until one day he announced his intent to return to the Mainland. Very soon after, he was disabled for life in a Raleigh car accident... It looked like an accident, but...? The driver of the car, a Mr. Zhang by name, drove right in front of a large dumptruck turning a corner that struck their car broadside on the passenger side where the Chinese graduate student had been sitting—and that was that. Since then, the Chinese math and computer science prodigy has spent his life in a wheelchair, barely able to function. And that could have been me two days ago—eight of our family cars already destroyed by third parties, no one to blame, no police investigations. What? No need to put words into my mouth: someone need speak the truth.