1st Place - SOPHIA BUSH - PTSD Poems

Your country’s fight

Shaking hands

Violent demands

The difference?

One stands for good and the other?

Asks you to kill your brother.

Believing in justice is gone

Your friends dead by dawn

Why?

Your country decides if you live or die

So grab your gun

Strap it on your son5

And prepare to fire

That’s your country’s desire

This is their fight

But we’ll see if you survive the night

Hidden truths

You say you wish only for peace 

Then why do you let your anger increase?

You scatter their remains

But what it contains-

What is contains is horrid

Burnt bodies and a hidden past

Now your lies and secrets have amassed

Share with us your dark history

Help us solve the mystery 

Tell us of those ashes you scattered in secret

Hiding them away in the walls of good

Of how you masked it within a hood

Holding those truths from the public

To make sure your image is fine

How you combine

Half truths with lies

And they’ve intertwined

You offer interviews but mix up your story

Because the truth is gory

And all you wished of was glory

Tell us of your secrets

And how you wished you could keep it

Because now it’s too late

You’ve sealed your fate

Off to that cell you go 

Full of sorrow and woe

Woe for your fellow man

How you had failed in your plan

Left only with your mind

You will soon find

It’s a dark place in there

How well will you fare?

Alone with a killer and a liar

Something that would’ve lifted you higher

Has now locked you in a cage

You’re stuck until your old of age

When the world was your stage

You released your rage

Locking you into that cage

Never to get a release

After you said you only wished for peace

Blood won’t wash past

Put down your guns

Hold hands with your sons

Let the truth shine within

Your enemy could have been your friend

But the blood won’t wash past

The history will last

The trauma and scars 

Left stained

That pain remained

Feeling horribly drained

And now you’ve been chained

Your hope constrained

The truth left unexplained

People see you as disdained 

You never knew what reality pertained

You’ve been dienged 

To carry that burden

Those deaths on your hands

The glass stuck in the sands

Stuck picking out the pieces of what once lied there

And trapped within a blank stare

Running and Waiting

Running from the truth

But stuck 

You resist it

Running from the lies

But trapped

You just missed it

Running from the memories

But consumed

You endure it

Running from your family

But scared

You weather it

Running

Racing

Hoping

Chasing

Wishing

Dreaming

Filled

Scheming

Waiting for the day

That you’re welcomed home

But waiting

On a future that will never come

The ring I am

If I had to describe my life as something

I’d say a ring

Worn and cold

Rusty and old

Because all my life I’ve been told

I had to fit the mold

And just as a ring

That silly, fickle thing

I was controlled

At first I shone like gold

But my sides started to fold

And soon enough I was sold

To a different idea, one that was bold

This new idea was different and strange

I had been rearranged

No longer listened to my maker

No longer a faker

Now something new

I broke the mold

Not what I was told

Everyone looks at me and assumes that I’m ok

That my brain is strong enough to tell itself to live another day

Inside I’m at war; on the battlefield

Telling my depressing thoughts to just yield

And every time I’ve gunned them down they pop right back up

Someone’s fueling the fire and they continue to run amuck 

People don’t see past the cruel insults and rude games

They assume and assume constantly shame

What a cruel victim I am

What a cruel victim am I

A victim set to relish in the pain of torture for all eternity 

Only to satiate monsters and demons

Ones that I created

Ones from my own heart and bloodlust

What a cruel victim am I

Made to cry and weep in despair until the tears have dried up

And the cries and yells are hoarse

What a cruel victim am I

Forced to hide my pain in a box

Locking it away from the world

Locking it from those who cause that pain

What a cruel victim am I

One who creates other victims as a means to satiate my own torment

I create from what I was borne

What a cruel victim am I

To pretend like I am the sole victim of this torment

And this never ending abuse

What a cruel victim am I

To never speak up until it’s too late

To worry and suffer in silence

Until that silence becomes me

What a cruel victim am I

That can’t even expel this torment from my soul

That can’t even speak the words that were soaked into my skin

Can’t even express the bleeding pain every time I look in the mirror

What a cruel victim am I

When I see the cause of my pain

And smile

And try to forget

What a cruel victim I am