How A Car Accident Made Me A Poet

Looking back on it now, with hindsight and the kind of time that living through a global pandemic allows, I finally was able to look back on the last six years of my life. Reanalyzing your life is a difficult process. While things are happening and the beat is moving and you’ve got fire under your heels there is no time to turn around or to try and see where your choices will lead you. Sure, some folks have that level of hindsight but I’ve never been one to wait around and study how things would turn out. Well I used to be, there was a time when I was a young lost twenty year old and all I did was plan, plan, plan. Instead of doing or just picking up the baseball bat and taking a swing, I would pace around my basement apartment and daydream. I built up an entire dimension of what could be but I never pulled the trigger.

I had fallen away from hitting the open mics and had just become a shut-in, partying my nights away and plotting big breaks in my head that I never had the courage to pull the trigger on.

Even when life is horrible, comfort can seep in like a heavy black blanket and encompass you even while your siting among flames. I was stuck in a rut working long hour days as an apprentice butcher for a small grocery chain based out of New York and throwing my nights away to oblivion.

With each passing week as one payday lead to another and as the year carried me from the fall to winter and then to spring my life was going nowhere. I made just enough money to pay my rent and the rest went to my habits and there was no room for creativity. I would tell myself that tomorrow was the day I would start putting one foot in front of the other. That the reason I stopped writing was so I could plan because all writers have to plan.

It was absolute nonsense.

I lost the power to do anything and was stuck in a riptide of routine and lost potential. It was like I was drowning in three feet of water. I know I could just stand up, I could just pull myself to dry land but I had lost the motivation to do anything.

Sometimes divine intervention enters your life like a chorus of angels or like a car plowing through a red traffic light. I’ve never heard an angel sing but I have been hit by a car on my way to work one morning. Leaving my basement apartment on my bicycle for my five mile ride to work, I was hungover and feeling numb. I walked my bike to the street and scanned both sides, hopped on, and began to pedal. I don’t know how to describe what happened next. It was like a 60 mph gust of wind blow through my bones. Like I was hollow and the force of concussion and collision just rattled my atoms.

I went airborne and landed on the car some fourteen feet down the road. I had no idea what was happening. Everything seemed red tone and the roar of the highway was muffled and warped like I was in an empty fishbowl.

People were all over the street now and watching the scene of this big guy stumbling on broken legs and the smashed up car with its hazards on in the middle of the road. I asked one woman, who must have been a neighbor if I could use her phone to call my job to tell them I was going to be late.

“Sweetie, you’re not going to work. You’re going to the hospital”

In one singular moment, I broke my legs and cracked my head open. I lost my ability to walk, I lost my job, I lost my basement apartment, and lost any sense of independence as I had to move back in with my grandmother in the trailer park. I was mad. So angry that all of this had happened and what was worse that NJ insurance shenanigans meant I would have to pay out of pocket for physical therapy until the driver’s insurance would cover it or we’d have to go to court. Long story short, I didn’t receive any physical therapy.

Every night when my grandmother would fall asleep I’d steal her walker and walk circles around the trailer park, forcing my mangled legs to reach asphalt one wobbly step at a time. I would often fall and my buddies would come home from the bar to see Damian laying on the side of the road but I did it. What fueled me was a deep seated anger. An anger at myself. I learned to walk again in less than a month with nothing shy of a brutal determination to grab my independence back and taste some of that good life.

During the day, I would lay around and watch videos of these rich digital nomad kids hop around the country and world and live a life of adventure and beautiful independence. I was desperate to break out of my hump. I posted a poem on Facebook titled “To The Lady Who Hit Me With Her Car” that got picked up by a magazine based out of Pennsylvania. The poem popped on Facebook and all of a sudden people were reading something that I posted. That someone outside of my head cared about my words, that perhaps by just stepping forward and stop wasting time.

I hit the open mic scene of New Jersey with reckless abandon after that and dedicated myself to being a poet. I’ve published five chapbooks, hosted four different poetry reading series, been published in dozens and dozens of magazines and have performed my poems around the country.

One of the largest tragedies in my life turned into the greatest blessing. By teaching myself to walk and breaking me out of my cyclical nothingness, I found meaning and self respect.

The rest as they say is history.