Begin Within The Yin

My longest stay has been a year
Of grinding time in lowest gear.
Asylums say the stay today
Is three months run then on your way.

So please don't ask me why oh why?
Do mad young ones choose youth to die
For I've learned not a single grain
Insightful to my own insane.

But madness dragged me back inside
To blackness wrapped in suicide,
When my dear friend, quite mad at best,
At forty-two chose his last rest.

His life depression won the day
As it took my sweet muse away.
Then next a friend from Vietnam
When ten years home was one night gone;

In Nam his pistol worn in sight
While flying Hueys to the fight
To pluck up soldiers stuck in mire
Then fly too high for hostile fire;

While fighting fires in his own mind;
Bipolar fires we both did find
Should play no part of our war game
But soon became its roaring flame.

He used his gun's one round to quell
His screamin' demon head from hell.
Hero till the day he died,
Is still a Nam caused suicide.

It is not when or where the fall,
Their names belong upon the wall;
How many Vets their balls still bent
Died prone alone on cold cement?

The naked act and will to kill
Brought some men home for killin' still,
Like those who went with troubled souls
Found napalm lies too full of holes.

A gallant soldier fights till dead
Too often for the lies he's fed.
Now who among you disagrees
That horrid wars fill histories.

No matter where or what you do
Some leaders find a war for you
To fight until that war is done
But what do you then tell your son?

As we leave every century
Still bleeding with hostility
Can insights deep within the Yin
Begin the Yang's defeat of sin?