Once a Soldier (PTSD)

Too drunk to opposing a poem he composing,
drove mad in disclosing the terrors of verse.
To battle, to blunder in a mind wracked with thunder,
falling asunder in his own universe.

Of a time, once a soldier, proud, upright, non nobler,
and now left to smolder in whiskey and tears.
The guilt and confessions, the bouts of depressions,
shredding his senses through the razors of fears.

In his angers lay seething, the loathsome self-reeking
while he could be reaping the fruits of his age.
In defeat, in the burning what once he a yearning,
twisting and turning with the beast in his cage.

Though skilled as a writer, who’d dare his reciter,
his truths to decipher read tough to consume.
As is true of its author comes whiskey from slaughter,
that drunken marauder to plunder his gloom.

Of hatred and poison, of a darksome horizon,
his cruel criticizing the nature of men.
When he’s drunk at his table, he’s Cain and he’s Abel,
the first from the cradle and murdered, amen.

The obscene, the immoral, the world in his quarrel,
no garlands of laurel, no crown fits his head.
In his dying submission, his only ambition,
his tombstone’s incision, ‘Thank God I am dead’.