A Soldier's Diary

How can something meant for protection

Be twisted around

To cause me affliction

Wandering around

I no longer know me

No longer do I understand where I've been

All that is kept

Is memories of me

Memories where I have repeatedly seen

Men I once knew being ripped from their youth

And tossed into battle

Without any clue

To be returned to their mothers

In the colours red white and blue.

I honestly ask, what harm did they do?

These memories have effects

They make me reflect

Reflect on my past

I would rather have left

The reflection is real

That reflection is me

A man with two Faces

It is not that obscene.

The faces are mine

But further in time

It may not be so clear

It will cause me to fear

The fear I feel will be from the bombs

The pictures of blood and screaming for "moms"

But most of all it'll be from the

Times that I had to take another man's life

Take it away like I had the rights

To deprive him the love of his mother and wife

To tear him away from the life that he lived

Before all of this

Before I took his.

I understand now

Why I cannot sleep

Why I cannot dream

Why I cannot think

My mind is plagued by the memories

Where I

Am no longer myself

They cause me to cry

Cry not for hate

Cry not for love

But these tears are for the fact

That I've had enough

Enough of the dreams

Enough of the violence

Enough of the silent terror I abide with

I think about death

I think about silence

I think of the easy way out

The lord wouldn't comply with

Yet I take out my gun

And put it aside me

Awaiting the time where angels will find me

Heart beating faster

Blood running colder

I place my hand upon the gun's metal holder

Lifting it up, it touches my chin

All light around me is beginning to dim

Tightening my grip on my life's final trigger

I wait for the bang to take it away quicker...

The gun sounds loudly

But doesn't fire at all

I pull it away

And drop to the floor

It's the third time I've tried this week

To take it away

But the day I arrived they took mine away

They gave me a fake to keep me insane

To stop me sometimes from feeling the pain

So sometimes I stop and lift it back up to realise

guns just don't work when they're made out of wood.