PTSD
On false pretext they sent me off
To murder and create,
But there, ’twas hard to hold aloof
Vacuity of hate,
And now the matter rests with me
But I don’t rest at all,
And it may be PTSD
But I’m not blessed at all.
We are the men “that don´t fit in,”
There’s no more fitting now,
Because nobility struck tin
With which men did endow
Their fantasy, as left a mess
All scrambled in my mind,
So I was left with PTS
And D not far behind.
The army sez that my SD
Existed pre post-trauma,
So not a dime will give to me
Except I have my Momma
To tell me, hold my temper down
But she has never been there,
Where cognizance emerged full-blown
Smack in the midst of sin there.
I thought that I could be a hero,
That I could go to school,
But concentration nearly zero
Has made me look the fool,
And I may know the alphabet
My teachers taught to me,
But first, in their disorder, set
Now PTS and D.
I never knew the kind of rage
As in my brain inhabits,
But not a player on the stage
It is not shooting rabbits
That got me to an awful fix,
Though you might find it funny,
PTSD plays funny tricks,
I wouldn’t hurt Bugs Bunny--
And yet at minor provocation
I’d take a schoolbus out--
It´s all because I served a nation
That didn’t have a doubt:
Derangement by rage reinforced
Has got me drinking liquor,
But while I cauterize the worst
Hostility grows thicker.
So all young men who go to war,
Although your cause be noble--
They’ll show you that esprit de corps
But leave you with the trouble,
A peck of trouble, as with P
Preceding T and S,
And then at last a final D,
To lodge at your address.
Wherever you may go, and with
Self-medication helping,
There is no helping with the myth:
Hostility keeps whelping
Despite nobility pronounced
On all the TV stations--
PTSD, when they have pounced,
One’s burden, not the nation’s.