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Jordan Frances Nov 2014
PTSD is not something you get over.
It is when soldiers get tired of hearing their own shots fire
Into a purple horizon of nothingness.
It is when assault victims are scared of becoming a statistic
And their brokenness is suffocating
It is when fear compels the mind to change
And it willingly obliges.
PTSD is when the darkness of human nature becomes evident
It is when it's stronghold is suddenly
More prominent than the beauty in the world
It's brash fingers create a vacuum
That ***** the sanity from your mind
Until you wake up in the middle of the night screaming
"Don't shoot me!"
"Don't **** her!"
You see him and now he is with your little sister
Taking her into his Jeep
While you stand there, watching
******* because you can do nothing about it.
This has not happened
And probably never will
But you are crippled by paralyzing bouts of anxiety and guilt and fear
From which your mind cannot console you
You can no longer hide the loss
That this event, this person, this illness
Has placed strategically within you.
It is when you will do anything to get these memories to stop playing on repeat
An endless loop maybe ended by alcohol
Check
Cutting
Check.
Promiscuity
Check
Anything that will eliminate cycle of not knowing
Of reliving
If only for a short time
Even pretending you believe in God
Because it makes it seem like there is a reason for this confusion
But then you begin to question why God would do this to his child
So you digress into darkness once again
Left feeling unsure.
PTSD is when you stop repressing memories
And they come back so forcefully that they knock you to the ground
Leaving you bruised and ******
Leaving you lost.
PTSD is different from other sicknesses
Because you do not feel sick
You feel there
Like you are in his bed again
And his room smells like mushrooms
That is actually a field of grenades
Waiting to explode throughout your small body
You remember the tone of his words
Slipping from his lips as though they are snakes
Strangling me, leaving breath unable to escape
This is not sick
As you feel no symptoms
But an altered state of consciousness
You do not even realize you are disconnecting as it happens
But this is Hell
This is war
You are broken
And the worst part about it
Is that you must understand your triggers
Your dissociations
Before you can get better.
Mateuš Conrad May 2017
i hate to break it like this, it's not a metaphor's worth of sentence that could become a riddle: it's not exactly a - why is a raven like w riting desk? because you're hunched, sitting over it, and scribbling with a pen, like a raven might with its claw(s)?

i wish i could make the following observation into a similar
riddle, but i can't, simply because it's too obvious...
      what bird, could possibly be a far removed cousin
                          of a sparrow?
                                i have two families of sparrows building
nests just outside my window...
                       so i notice the fidget and the "anxiety" of their
little bodies...
                       but the link is in their tails...
  the tails aren't exactly like flowers blooming in spring,
opening like a peacock's tail for courtship...
               nor like the raven's tail... nor like woodland pigeons' tail...
they're sharp, pointy... never unfolding,
           simply because the sparrows are little spitfires...
they require a sharp tail that doesn't unfold, for greater speed,
  like a shark's fin...
                         the natural aerodynamic addition to their little bodies...
so who could possibly be the sparrows' cousin?
             answer?              *magpies
!
and because of the longer sharp tail that doesn't unfold,
                                   like the sparrows,
i dare say, i'll call magpies the aero resemblance to the their aqua
       cousins that are, stingrays.
come on... we've differentiated far enough,
        poetry can't differentiate... the "only" thing poetry can
do is integrate... to make language, so dismembered: a whole;
doubly stressed: it's about making associations...
             not about making dissociations...
                         so yeah... sparrows... magpies... stingrays.
Matt Sol Jan 2019
Heres a fun puzzle for those who like writing lyrics or like adding layers to yoru poetry.... all musicians do this... Example.. Use the song Another Brick in The Wall by pink Floyd as a starting point... We don't need NO(Nyctophobia) education, we don't need no thought control (photo, tvs), no dark sarcasm in the classroom (catoptro, [cain and abel, the domestication of cats and dogs, hunter gatherers, farming), teacher leave those kids ALONe(ankylo… Lust Envy Greed)…. and align pairs or triplets of heavier phobias with pairs of more subconscious fears, like light (or waking up and the psychology behind that){random example, nycto, mono, auto, photo catoptro} and align each group of 5 with one of the 7 deadly sins (its 8, hubris and vein glory are split into their own group, its a trick) and get secret messages from them such as (A-gate) etc or from anagrams within each set of 5 till you learn what influences each of the 7 deadly sins.. like hubris is partially a creation of limit testing... envy is a product of identifications and dissociations (vein glory is split into one of its own because its origin is your ******* stage or when you realize your ***)…. or you can do it to Come Together by the Beatles and align the groups together to get messages from your 5 stages of your libido.... Oral, ****, *******, Latent, and Genital as well as aligning them with the 4 levels of dreams..... Condensation, Displacement, Visualization, and Symbolism and look for secret messages.... then after you get messages or instructions with the the anagrams on each level look for directions to draw and use the letters to create images, some of them are interesting
Its important because alienating identifications are what constitute your ego :)… BTW for another brick in the wall start out with Nycto at the top then Photo Then Catoptro then Ankylo (just immobility) and layer them with the 7 deadly sins... then alter afterwards once you get a hang of it.... BTW this is what Shakespeare does, youll see once you do it how it starts to tell a story and how it parallels his plays
AMarie Jan 2021
enough time has passed
for me to ask
is the process worth it
a second time?
to put a dime to my name,
to put time towards a “greener” path,
presumably.

dissociations of a self
far from home
remains such an enthralling story.
i'm sitting in the bathroom at ul. Radwana 13 / 72,
i must say: a rather unusual place to start
my long awaited archaeology of the ego -
but long awaited for whom?
me or a readership...

               i have recently inherited a chrome book
with those old school protruding click click clickers
of QWERTY: protruding in that they are
easily found, almost like tickling newly sprouted
flowers from the ground...

i find myself in the form of: my and self
yet over psycholo-loco-gist...
of wording will not help:

the gents had their fun with the spirits...
they drank and drank and talked of plans for
their lives, they wasted good liquor on dressing up
on having fun:
they never took alcohol seriously...
now one of them: namely my uncle...
is a death within life, which is worse than death
itself...

i am so rigid from not trying
i am rigid from my former escapades with the allowances
of a good keyboard and a decent internet
connection...

what i am currently studying is the punctuation
of Frank Herbert...
it has been well over 4 years since i read any fiction
seriously...
bogged down in existential prose serious literature
i gave so much of my reading-time
to Knausgaard and his Mein Kampf
feigning defeat when life became as serious
that i had to find an alternative...
and yes... the new adaptations of the Dune books
put a negative indentation in my current reading
of the first book...
but lucky for me i'm picking up on certain
cinematic nuances... notably concerning Hawat
the Mentat who would roll his eyes back to
make calculations and who had a rectangular stain
on his lips from drinking the sapho juice...
cranberry stain...

what are the chances to reach the same heights
of excavation i was familiar with,
perhaps if i write long enough i can bypass the initial
struggle: because i will not waste this little gush of
***** reaching my cheeks
having to substitute a chaser of Fanta
with some orange juice (half)
and half of Polish mineral water...
unlike any other mineral water i know...
for there are three gradations of it around here...

gazowana (sparkling)
nie-gazowana (still)
lekko-gazowana (slightly sparkling)...

this fun side of the tongue, the only instance
where there is a double consonant:

LEKI (medicine)
LEKKI (light, masculine)
LEKKA (light, feminine)
   light as in not heavy, not light as in darkness...

i have traveled across eons and sleep and haven't
slept a wink in the process...
now almost strange to have a washing machine as a writing
desk in the dim light...

perhaps spacing, not even the subject matter will suffice
to somehow give me escapism...
what "should" have taken place is the idea
of an uncle retiring in his 50s...
able to somehow come closer to his mother
in her 80s and with enough dough
to party via travel for the next 10 years
and spare for invest in at least 2 or 3 properties...

now i visit him in the house of cripples...
the once known jealous vitality from ***** house
to ***** house...
this juggernaut of virility reduced to a ******* zombie like
shadow...
bit lips, crooked teeth...
vague associations and even vaguer dissociations
on the word-logic spectrum as provided by the doctors...
not so much having drank himself to
a zombie body but no early grave
his inability to invoke the body to similitude with
iron vitamin D3...
a shell of a man... once clean shaven...
now mimic of grandfather...

and all this female warfare
this daughter against mother and grandmother against
mother all this
this scaffold and crows and rotting of meat...
but diligent i somehow trying to work my way around
the fatalism...
is it so wrong of me to go out of my way
to buy the old woman a few new books
some chocolate,
to cook her pork, pork meatballs in a tomato sauce
with a special mash potatoes...
infusing the meat with caraway seeds...
yes... because that's almost the distant cousing
of cumin seeds... at least around here...
around here, "here" being: ul Radwana 13 / 72
Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski...

           i used to spend so many joyful days in these
confines, yet now i itch with a feeling of being
the Grim Grey...
reading about melange, spice, cinnamon...
i conjure up a fusion of poetry and prose and think
about Caladan and i think about earth
and i think about the white gold that is salt...
i've choked on tears and i shed some tears
but for all the talk of water in the sands
there is little talk of salt in the dunes...
perhaps those equivalent to Arabs in the Dune universe
have no notion of taste when it comes
to the ingestion of food...

i hardly imagined myself to be a fan of any work...
i tried to be a fan of the Beatniks...
grew a beard, forgot i had toenails
later forgot i had toes...
therefore re-imagined my feet as twinkle axes...
chopping step with stomp and air...
oh this air in Poland...
when was the last time i visited Poland
near the time of birth, come May...
that is spring... when the violets started to bloom...
when the continent gave up her riches
of distinguishing seasons from
that Caladan damp of England...
how many of the past suppose summers have
i spent on that dreaded island of grot grit and grey?

thus this DUMP of lettering and spacing and
whatever other, "other" technicality might
be obstructive, obtrusive, ob- ob-:
signal one signifying beacon of obstruct for
for me to follow up with the right sort of juice:
because i am the one to have squandered
the... "ridicule of the use of words"?

seems like a fear of god is never enough
when justifying the games equivalent to the chess
people play with mortality...

just one fetish freer from the nearer,
some Novalis (von Hardenberg) -
as i very much like to name street names and places
in German,
because i find the Polacks neglecting their tongue
as much as they neglected their earth:
through the tribulations of a lackluster of attachments...

perhaps those Arabs and waiting for the dino-juice
to propel the locomotive bonanza
of the Lamborghini engine...
sand-worm earthworm ego sworn mouth agape
like sitting in a Turkish akimbo poise...

the sun was never going to lose a tooth:
let alone a golden one,
but by topic of grey in water
and white in metal
and green in mahogany...
a tease out of respect for the one handed clapping
like some inevitable "cultural appropriation"
from meditating the death of Christianity
in the European soul and the invitation toward
Buddhism, extrapolation...
because this half a liter of *****
will measure just fine when this washing mashine
is silent...
while the solace of orbits of the grand orbs
like mountains cradling deserts satisfies...
like the windless lights
and what is conversation? locum?

i find little gesticulation of comfort in people
who regurgitate sayings, supposedly wise on the onset,
with sensibility of perpetuating a humanism
of their otherwise deviant comfort
of sheltering in hubbub and commotion
and click-bait not-known-to-fish conundrums...

by now the eagerness of flying into a bed
on a half whim half dream,
like a parody of a blinking universe:
each to his own sorrows and intact:
ensuring these sorrows do not multiply...
but become these self-contained mechanisations
of self-digestion: to diffuse the anger and agony
of the shared experience...
some semblance of a collectivist effort
where the individual is sacrificed and not glorified
that this democratic beacon of vector
adamant force-hood falsehood is dried up
conquered and subsequently squandered on
readily imitable minds of the youth...
so that youthful fancies may pass and by the rigors of time
and matrimony of the geology in the air
become hard pressed to usher in the only known
individuation that's the citizen and with it
a necropolis of first reference: as mortal abiding
non coup...

through some prism of the elected editorial
staff of the newly arrived freedom of the flimsy:
wind without paper...
came a torrent of freely available voiced
concerns for what could be said: could be unsaid...
what a forlorn essential craft of
symbolism to be tortured thus by crucifix
and the faceless man of Islam...
at least the distinction ingrained...

keeping a jug of water in both desert and in sea...
to drink to waste...
perhaps a jug of ***** in the forests and hybrid
tundras of sloth and cold and
what other bouquet of the thus presented
entourage of immobility of parlance of formal
is: what more expected of me?!

no more hunger no more stealth and no more
Japanese encrypted borrowing of tongues...
to ****** a MA into a マ
    subsequently: ******* palindromes...
because Japanese might allow a MA but will not
allow an AM... unless it's: TENET, RADAR...
a palindrome...
thus listed:

                 アマ
                 オト          oto... here, thus...

ama                  well... given the English tong and tie and glue of T
that would invoke Anna...
and faTTer...
                not father, though...

i think it best to understand Japanese scribbles through
palindromes...
whether that's me excavating consonants from
elaborating vowels or what not...
my... at least i have retained a memory of my old
themes and hobbies...
notably these...
because i...

palindromes... yes... that's how to best discover
consonants as free standing
as vowels are in Japanese via palindromes...
given... my stay in Hawaii was peppered with the history
of the Polynesians...
who's origins began with the wild oar brigade second
not celebrated to the vikings
from the little island of Taiwan...
across the seas without sails
across like the Mongols across Siberia
and the Russians toward Alaska...

                     palindromes...

イキ (iki)
イシ         (isi)

          leo mai honua...

                                leo nui: mai hāmau wai...    

of no talk of science fiction and i can see the equivalent
of the Fremen in the Polynesians
and see this world as that of what happens
when the once former mountain range
of Sahara now is desert and
waiting for the desert of Himalaya
because then were the known mountains of Saharans
while the seas boiled and the ice caps melted
and we were dreaming a history
somehow inherited before the insomnia
of journalism and the **** of light brought down
with strobe amnesia and suffocation of the attractive
glittering half of halves...
while the litter of the brood of peoples
squabbled over the 7th October 20224...
without much squabble equivalent to the massacre
at the Bataclan attack in Paris...

do wiosł!
    to oars!
                                 i nā ***!

let us leave these superstitious people to their
magic stones their kippahs
their niqabs and their orientation with the stars
almighty as if... as if...
this orb might be ever displaced by their potent
numb **** and over-sized ego-*****
and clipped ***** of Egypt!

— The End —