Stress Disordinary

It’s 4 AM do you know where your mother is?

I do

I always do

She’s a floor above me screaming

Heaving up cries

Capsules of air won’t penetrate her lungs

She’s got the runs

She’s literally trying to run away

Evaporate

Escape

From a prison I can’t locate

So I guess I don’t really know where she really is

I hope it’s dreaming

But it’s hard to tell

when her body swells with heavy breathing

I don’t know where

P T S D

has taken her

At 58 mom was kidnapped

Trapped in a memory of a man beating her

I hate that name

No one wins

Score isn’t kept by bruises on her skin

Yet years since she left him

Something’s underneath, beneath, within

When mom got diagnosed with

P T S D

I didn’t believe her

I thought it was just for soldiers

Men crushed by bullets or boulders

Marines in Vietnam burnt down by the Vietcong

Running

     Flying

Dying

But I kept trying to understand

Demand to be normal

I didn’t see the cut so I ignored the bleeding

I wanted to be a child so I acted like one

Her mental illness didn’t fit the media’s depiction

so I disregarded it as fiction

Reduced pain to self pitying addiction

But mom fought a war

Our country surrendered

The courts speculated she was too educated for abuse

Her PhD outweighed her battle wounds

Calling justice was no use

friction and affliction wore in the sores

We didn’t live beneath the poverty line

So they sketched us out as crazy

Said she was insane on enough papers

Until it was a diagnosis

A psychosis

And as I woke up every night

to sound of my mother screaming

She didn’t sound human anymore

She sounded like a statistic

It wasn’t realistic

That she loved me with every letter

But was reduced to 4

P T S D

an acronym for

Polite Talk of Someone’s Damage

Pushing Titles on Suppressed Demons

Persistent Tremors Shuddering Down as

Panic Terrorizes Simple Days

Pleasant Talk for Structured Destruction

You can’t function when you’re defined by

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

hammering behind your eyes

my reply:

Please Talk about Something Different

Stop telling me she’s insane

Because what’s really crazy

is that we don’t let  emotional bullet holes

heal into scars

It’s 5 AM

Do you know where my mother is?