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PTSD |
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On the dark, soft shoulder of night
I come again calling
I bring a dram of violence in memorial spite,
Of renewed anger in hate spawning
Cataclysmic seed planted in long ago fight
A dollop of truth mixed with your favorite fears
Between here, and there
A malicious fear crashing across light years
Primal screams splitting the air.
Again I take you forlorn into that jungle sweating
Filled again with deep despair
Feel my coming
Destroying you mentally, spiritually, socially
Like a flood over you pouring
My memories sing
Again sensing with uncanny way of knowing
How I relish the physical pain I bring
In trials of body and spirit
You're alone without reprieve or respite.
My warring spirit cuts the heads
Off the flowers of sprightful youth,
Impaling hearts of those but kids
Who go forth to fight in my battles uncouth!
How happy I am to see you once more abandoned
Maligned
Repressed
Feeling again bestial urges procreated
Hating everybody, yourself most of all
Again short of breath depressed
Moments before battle's pall
Relive now the unthinkable degradation
Face the horror once more without deviation
Bury deep inside assaulting confusions.
Feel again rising anticipation of killing's illusions.
Feel war's bloodied frenzy boiling in your brain
Feel the soulless fright of long ago despairing
Like restless spirits rising guilt's refrain
In sensitivities killed dead and dying
Feel again the moment you have killed
Feel the blood on your hands you've spilled
Poking an eternal hole through your heart
Remember how you emptily joked of death
Hoping if you joked about deaths part
It would not come... but never fear
I am here!
I'm always near!
I will not forsake you as others have!
I will not let you so soon forget that year!
No, you have not escaped me American soldier
I harangue you still with scattered senses
In dreams bolder
That abed in rest you ponder
I penetrate your wearied defenses
Revive relentless spirits in you restless
Keeping you sleepless
Agitated
Anxious
Awakening to sounds of a machine guns clatter
Its sickening thumping splattering human remains
See it... relive it, does this now still matter
Remember with venomous refrains
Whomp whomp whomp of helicopter chatter
My trauma comes into the dead of night grinding
Carried into the thickness of pain
My job to do the killing
Walking so softly in monsoon rain
My consuming anguish destroys you mentally
Walking
Suddenly embroiled in raucous cacophony
Creeping
So as not to wake the dead
Assuage culminating
Of war's foul dread.
Dream your sweet dreams
Try to forget Nam's incessant toxicology
Consorting with the demon of schemes
Mitigate war's vicious abnormality
Pressing to futile irritability
I scream till you can't think clearly
Everybody around making life uncomfortable
But don't worry, I'll always be there
Ever reminding you of that vacant chair
You really should have sat there...
Every night I'll show you the empty eyes
Discover again your gut shot brother
I'll make you look deep into the eyes
Of his fatherless child
Look into tearful eyes
Of his young bride...
O no, you cannot hide...
Think back on war's vicious anomaly
Where more than ever before in life history
Those loved dearest
Bide away from you farthest,
While specters of death hover ever more nearest.
Feel now that familiar tingling up your spine.
Feel taut knots impatiently forming in your gut.
In your bed in prone ambush lying supine
In cutthroat night relive freedom's juggernaut.
Feel coiled springs inside me
Still begging for release
Violence boiling in me
Stored there to remember evermore without peace
Come rushing adrenaline
Across light years that will not their terror's cease
Living from then to now maudlin.
Still you're every night fighting
Across Satan's fetid turf churning
Into voracious jaws of death's maw mouthing
Still every night waking
Remembering still the killing
Still in dreams see the dead
Blood running into eyes thick and red
Life shattered by horns that still gore
Still cursing barbaric war's carnivore
Still both God and devil imploring
Still Hell on earth enduring.
What great loyalty you have for me.
I don't have to kill you dead
To have you join me
Because by all appearances you're already dead
You're killing yourself daily
Living with atrocity that war in you bred
I'm more important to you obviously,
Than friends with all their loving
I've taken over your life bullishly,
I'm the first thing you wake up to every morning,
Robbed of will to do anything about it, candidly.
I journey with you through wretched life abysmally
Riding choppers to the end of your thousand yard stare
Back to where life treated you so abusively
Ever going in memory back there
In life lived painfully
Still looking for answers back there
You find pleasure in the mire wallowing
Ever looking for meaning
In gutters metaphorically
Day to day living in past memory abhorrently.
You cannot escape
Coping with this pall over you I drape...
I'm with you day and night
Ever part of your mind's landscape
Renewing war's ingrained bite...
We drink together my brother, till you pass out
Feeling sorry for yourself inherently,
Just a burned out Boy Scout
By the very ones you served outcast abjectly
Long ago in a land called Vietnam
I first got a hold of you to make life accursed
Bore into your inner being my ticking time bomb
Perpetuating the dream of innocence burst
Permeating your soul from that time on....
Destroying on, and on, and on...
You can never have enough guilt,
Shaking with icy cold sweat
I've a monster in you built
You can never pay my debt
Jailed, insane, lost in another institution
Trying for what you've done to make restitution
Of my insidious hold you'll never be free...
Bound to go through life pathetically.
Unproductive, barren, unbearably
Sacrificing jobs, friends, loved ones... to me!
Forever mine for all time you see
You belong to me unalterably
I'm your very own PTSD!
Won't you come again and talk to me? |
By
Gary Jacobson
Copyright 2001
Listed
September 19, 2010 |
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About
Author...
In 1966-67, Gary Jacobson served with B Co
2nd/7th 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and is the recipient of the Purple
Heart.
Gary, who resides in Idaho writes stories he
hopes are never forgotten, perhaps compelled by
a Vietnamese legend that says, "All poets are
full of silver threads that rise inside them as
the moon grows large." So Gary says he
writes because "It is that these silver
threads are words poking at me � I must let them
out. I must! I write for my brothers who cannot
bear to talk of what they've seen and to educate
those who haven't the foggiest idea about the
effect that the horrors of war have on
boys-next-door."
Visit Gary Jacobson's site for more information
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