Six short lines, no punctuation to speak of, and Dave Bonta's "PTSD" still manages to hold a whole inventory of weight. The title is a clinical acronym, the kind of label found on forms and diagnoses. The poem beneath it drops that cool vocabulary for plain, bodily words: work, gut, bed, hurt. The gap between the label and the language is part of the point. A diagnosis names a condition, but the poem cares about what it is like to live inside one, and about who believes you when you say so.
The central idea arrives in the first line: "I work to carry several heavy things." The speaker doesn't say "I carry" but "I work to carry," so effort is built into the grammar. Living with this is labour, not a mood. What follows is the list of burdens, and its first entry is deliberately slippery: "a lie the war." With no comma, the phrase wobbles. It could be two items, a lie and the war. It could mean the war is the lie. It could be a lie told about the war. The poem refuses to choose, and the reader is left carrying all the possibilities, which suits a poem about things that can't be put down.
The second stanza turns the war into geography: "that violent red map in my gut." A map flattens a territory into something you can look at, and here the territory is the speaker's own body. Red suggests blood, or the colour of danger on a chart. The gut is where fear is felt before it is thought. The word "that," instead of "a," makes the map feel familiar, a thing he has seen many times. Then comes "enough to have killed me," a past-tense phrase that says he survived something sized like a death. Judging by the imagery, the wound could be physical or psychological, and the poem never says which. That blur between body and mind may be the most truthful thing about it.
The third stanza shrinks the scale sharply, from the war to a bed. "My wife in bed shifting / doubtful of my hurt." The verb "shifting" quietly echoes the opening, since loads shift, and it also suggests restless sleep, perhaps a turning away. Placing this last makes the poem's argument clear. The final burden is not the enemy or the memory but the doubt of the person lying closest. "Hurt" is a small, almost childlike word beside the acronym in the title, and it sounds like a plain statement that might not be believed. Its sound also answers "work" in the first line, with the same vowel and a hard closing consonant. Effort and injury frame everything between them.
The sound and shape of the poem do much of this work without rhyme or regular metre. The first line runs close to a steady iambic pentameter, an even, dutiful rhythm like someone walking under a load. After that the lines shorten and stumble. "A lie the war" is only four syllables, and the poem seems to lose its stride as the weight shifts. Three unrhymed two-line stanzas give a sense of neat compartments, but the lowercase openings ("a lie," "that violent," "my wife") make each one read as a continuation of the last. With no full stop at the end, the sentence never closes and the burden is never set down.
The poem also moves inward in three steps, from history (the war) to the body (the gut) to the marriage (the bed). The distance narrows until the conflict is in the room with him.
What makes it worth reading is how little it uses. It makes no speeches and gives no details of battle. It treats an injury that can't be seen, and shows that being disbelieved can hurt as much as the wound. By leaving things unpunctuated and unexplained, it lets the reader feel something of the weight rather than just being told about it.