The U.S. Has the Most COVID Deaths Worldwide

The U.S. has the most -
The U.S. has the most COVID deaths worldwide. The
U.S. has the most COVID deaths worldwide.
The gasket too thin. We had to stand for the flag every
day and the tide convinced me I was too
autistic to understand. Alien and slow-moving, slow to
pick up on cues, quick to understand what was
too alien for me was too much for your subconscious too.
You can't communicate with words
You can't communicate with words how far-reaching the
exceptionalism is, infecting even other countries, aspiring
to American style and New York head-down quick-stepping
grace, and how do you communicate to other
countries that within that aspiration
we are a fourth-world country too -
on a dimension smaller than any measured
by tools.
The U.S. has the most COVID deaths
worldwide and my identity fractured under
the weight of all the ways I was traumatized
but only now does our media write on PTSD,
first the soldiers, now the middle-class
businessmen on conference calls with
their family.
There's no diagnosis for the young boys who
shot bullets through my neighborhood
or the ways we were "better off than the rest are,"
close your eyes to the ways you're in pain
because this is America, the great.
I've been gaslighted to such an extent
that there is no poetic way to put it.
We need a new word that won't be co-opted
by frustrated people with a steady income
online. Gaslight doesn't belong to
me anymore and it doesn't belong to you,
if you're reading it,
because there's not a word for
what we went through.
If you can describe it from the outside
you are already too far removed
to understand what it's like.