My 1^st trisect poem. The trisect is my own semantically complex poetic form which I will use to help me with developing my use of depictive language.

The first segment focuses on cardboard. I used to create cardboard forts when I was a child—sometimes very elaborate—and hang out in them all day long. Some of them would be portable, and some would be built in vacant lots or alleyways blocks or miles from home. They were always very well camouflaged, so my little hideout would remain my little hideout. The portable ones I’d often setup at the edge of a busy parking lot, made to look like a pile of scrap cardboard, where I’d hang out and just watch people without them knowing. These simple forts were a safe haven for me, a private place to go and be away from troubles and worries. And I had my share.

The second segment focuses on the automobile, the car. I remember reading up on their manufacturing process and design, and the primary materials used in their construction, before starting this segment.

The third segment focuses on a little mishap I had in one of those cardboard forts as a 14 year old, which involved a car. It was in an alleyway a few blocks from home. City blocks. Los Angeles City blocks. About a mile away at least. I had some big fight with my mother that day and decided I’d just have my own space that night in a cardboard fort I and a friend had built a day or two before. It was a beautiful fort, with four separate compartments, each of which were big enough to lay out flat in. The whole thing was masterfully camouflaged with various sorts of debris from the area, including dead palm branches and branches of other sorts. In the end it looked like a slash pile, just a bunch of branches and other random materials tossed into a pile—but it was hollow, and there were access points.

That night as I slept a car slammed into the fort and ran over my right arm, shoulder, and neck, breaking the upper arm longways from near the elbow across to the top near the ball socket, and blew a piece out of the ball socket itself. My neck was severely sprained—which is of course a miracle. It was possible to make out the tire treads on my throat. How I happened to be aligned such that the tire didn’t snap my head one way and pop my skull off the spine like a bottle opener I have no idea.

This was my first NDE. I have no way to prove it, but I just know. I know what I experienced, and I was dead for at least a moment—and a moment is long enough to be dead. Sometime I’ll dedicate some poetry and discussion to that experience. But as I “returned”, after the car had somehow managed to back up off me without running over my neck a second time, I sprang up in a panic, and it came toward me again, then stopped, then backed all the way down the alley and around the far corner, as if in a mad rush to escape affiliation with the mishap. I’ll never forget the sight of those headlights.

I was near a series of hotels. And each time I knocked, with my left arm since right wouldn’t respond, the owners would come to the door and I’d ask for help and they’d slam the door on me. It sucked. In this manner I ended up up making my way half a mile to an apartment complex my mom had lived in a year or so before, where some people knew me, and an ambulance was called.