I remember when I was twenty-six,
sliding down the road on my side,
headfirst, at fifty mph,
my motorcycle next to me.

I remember thinking,
“This is not going to end well.”

I remember road rash,
a knee that kept me out of work for a month
and a concussion.
I think.

I remember wearing that denim jacket as a badge,
buying a new helmet
and feeling luckier than hell.

I remember waiting another twenty years
before I broke my first bone.

They say I screamed like a girl when
the forklift ran over,
then stopped on,
my leg.

I don’t remember it quite that way,
but I know I was thinking about that motorcycle
as it happened.

Pre-collision (1978), although all damage was on the right side and minor

Day Twenty-Nine of 2016 NaPoWriMo.
The prompt from napowrimo.net:
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on things you remember. Try to focus on specific details, and don’t worry about whether the memories are of important events, or are connected to each other.  You could start by adopting Brainard’s uniform habit of starting every line with “I remember,” and then you could either cut all the instances of “I remember,” or leave just a few in.  At any rate, hopefully you’ll wind up with a poem that is heavy on concrete detail, and which uses that detail as its connective tissue.  Happy writing!