On the moor dwells Bonnie Jennie
On the cliffs she flies alone;
And her beauty is of such force
'Twill turn any man to stone.

The fairness of her wond'rous face
Has made men blind, crazed, or sick;
And the fleeting chill of her touch
Has frozen them to the quick.

And in the land a soldier dwells,
As straight as ary on the moor;
"And I must touch Jennie's hand," he says,
"Just once, ere I breathe no more."

Would you forsake your house and home,
Forsake your good friends three?
"I'd forsake it all for Jennie's touch,
I'd swim through the wine-dark sea."

Would you forsake all you know,
And forsake your station here?
"For Bonnie Jennie's thrilling touch,
I'd go with no twinge of fear."

But Bonnie Jennie beckons now,
She beckons with shiv’ring hand!
"Then I must leave you in the mist,
And say farewell to my native land."

He starts, and moves, and reaches out
To caress that impossible face;
But Bonnie Jennie flutters back,
And darts from place to place.

And the Bonnie Jennie is away,
Pulled back like a kite on a string;
And he is left with naught but mist,
And can hear not a blessed thing.

And try as he might, he cannot recall
The features of her he has seen;
He is tormented by his missing thoughts
But does not know what they mean.

Momma used to say a stupid is as a stupid does, and well Jennie I may be dumb but I know what love is. Life is like a box of chocolates, never know what you're gonna get, but I know what I want and I want you Jennie. You once asked me if I ever dream about who I'm gonna be, and well I don't know Jennie, I don't know who I want to be because I'm just me. I would run to the edge of the earth to be with you, I can't leave my past behind me when you're in it, I want to move forward but with you by my side. Like I've said before Jennie your my girl. You always will be, even if you never return a message back to me. I think I'm getting sick, so is the boy, maybe we got your illness before you left. I'm getting weaker by the minute, I feel as if I am about to die. So if this is the last goodbye, then so be it, I will be waiting for you in heaven. Goodbye Jennie.

Her morning began well I suppose
She may have been from out of town
Otherwise I would have not lived my day
With her as I did

I was standing on the corner of holy ground
St. Marks and First in the City
I saw her coming towards me.
She was with a friend
She passed me and then with a few steps more
She sat on a stoop.
She’s drunk I thought
She leaned over and fell on her side

We just did some stuff her friend said
Is she OK
I shook her slightly
What is her name I asked her friend
Jennie
Jennie I said loudly
Jennie
I pinched the skin between her thumb and forefinger
Hard hard with my nails
Nothing

People stopped and looked
Call an ambulance
Her breathing was slowing
I pressed my mouth to hers
And blew and blew
Again and again
Nothing
I pressed her chest over her heart
Again and again
She was gone
Her friend was gone
The ambulance arrived
and I went into the bar on the corner

for Jennie in gratitude*

For days afterwards he was preoccupied by what he’d collected into himself from the gallery viewing. He could say it was just painting, but there was a variety of media present in the many surrounding images and artefacts. Certainly there were all kinds of objects: found and gathered, captured and brought into a frame, some filling transparent boxes on a window ledge or simply hung frameless on the wall; sand, fixed foam, paper sea-water stained, a beaten sheet of aluminium; a significant stone standing on a mantelpiece, strange warped pieces of metal with no clue to what they were or had been, a sketchbook with brooding pencilled drawings made fast and thick, filling the page, colour like an echo, and yes, paintings.
 
Three paintings had surprised him; they did not seem to fit until (and this was sometime later) their form and content, their working, had very gradually begun to make a sort of sense.  Possible interpretations – though tenuous – surreptitiously intervened. There were words scrawled across each canvas summoning the viewer into emotional space, a space where suggestions of marks and colour floated on a white surface. These scrawled words were like writing in seaside sand with a finger: the following bird and hiraeth. He couldn’t remember the third exactly. He had a feeling about it – a date or description. But he had forgotten. And this following bird? One of Coleridge’s birds of the Ancient Mariner perhaps? Hiraeth he knew was a difficult Welsh word similar to saudade. It meant variously longing, sometimes passionate (was longing ever not passionate?), a home-sickness, the physical pain of nostalgia. It was said that a well-loved location in conjunction with a point in time could cause such feelings. This small exhibition seemed full of longing, full of something beyond the place and the time and the variousness of colour and texture, of elements captured, collected and represented. And as the distance in time and memory from his experience of the show in a small provincial gallery increased, so did his own thoughts of and about the nature of longing become more acute.
 
He knew he was fortunate to have had the special experience of being alone with ‘the work’ just prior to the gallery opening. His partner was also showing and he had accompanied her as a friendly presence, someone to talk to when the throng of viewers might deplete. But he knew he was surplus to requirements as she’d also brought along a girlfriend making a short film on this emerging, soon to be successful artist. So he’d wandered into the adjoining spaces and without expectation had come upon this very different show: just the title Four Tides to guide him in and around the small white space in which the art work had been distributed. Even the striking miniature catalogue, solely photographs, no text, did little to betray the hand and eye that had brought together what was being shown. Beyond the artist’s name there were only faint traces – a phone number and an email address, no voluminous self-congratulatory CV, no list of previous exhibitions, awards or academic provenance. A light blue bicycle figured in some of her catalogue photographs and on her contact card. One photo in particular had caught the artist very distant, cycling along the curve of a beach. It was this photo that helped him to identify the location – because for twenty years he had passed across this meeting of land and water on a railway journey. This place she had chosen for the coming and going of four tides he had viewed from a train window. The aspect down the estuary guarded by mountains had been a highpoint of a six-hour journey he had once taken several times a year, occasionally and gratefully with his children for whom crossing the long, low wooden bridge across the estuary remained into their teens an adventure, always something telling.
 
He found himself wishing this work into a studio setting, the artist’s studio. It seemed too stark placed on white walls, above the stripped pine floor and the punctuation of reflective glass of two windows facing onto a wet street. Yes, a studio would be good because the pictures, the paintings, the assemblages might relate to what daily surrounded the artist and thus describe her. He had thought at first he was looking at the work of a young woman, perhaps mid-thirties at most. The self-curation was not wholly assured: it held a temporary nature. It was as if she hadn’t finished with the subject and or done with its experience. It was either on-going and promised more, or represented a stage she would put aside (but with love and affection) on her journey as an artist. She wouldn’t milk it for more than it was. And it was full of longing.
 
There was a heaviness, a weight, an inconclusiveness, an echo of reverence about what had been brought together ‘to show’. Had he thought about these aspects more closely, he would not have been so surprised to discovered the artist was closer to his own age, in her fifties. She in turn had been surprised by his attention, by his carefully written comment in her guest book. She seemed pleased to talk intimately and openly, to tell her story of the work. She didn’t need to do this because it was there in the room to be read. It was apparent; it was not oblique or difficult, but caught the viewer in a questioning loop. Was this estuary location somehow at the core of her longing-centred self?  She had admitted that, working in her home or studio, she would find herself facing westward and into the distance both in place and time?
 
On the following day he made time to write, to look through this artist’s window on a creative engagement with a place he was familiar. The experience of viewing her work had affected him. He was not sure yet whether it was the representation of the place or the artist’s engagement with it. In writing about it he might find out. It seemed so deeply personal. It was perhaps better not to know but to imagine. So he imagined her making the journey, possibly by train, finding a place to stay the night – a cheerful B & B - and cycling early in the morning across the long bridge to her previously chosen spot on the estuary: to catch the first of the tides. He already understood from his own experience how an artist can enter trance-like into an environment, absorb its particularness, respond to the uncertainty of its weather, feel surrounded by its elements and textures, and most of all be governed by the continuous and ever-complex play of light.
 
He knew all about longing for a place. For nearly twenty years a similar longing had grown and all but consumed him: his cottage on a mountain overlooking the sea. It had become a place where he had regularly faced up to his created and invented thoughts, his soon-to-be-music and more recently possible poetry and prose. He had done so in silence and solitude.
 
But now he was experiencing a different longing, a longing born from an intensity of love for a young woman, an intensity that circled him about. Her physical self had become a rich landscape to explore and celebrate in gaze, and stroke and caress. It seemed extraordinary that a single person could hold to herself such a habitat of wonder, a rich geography of desire to know and understand. For so many years his longing was bound to the memory of walking cliff paths and empty beaches, the hypnotic viewing of seascaped horizons and the persistent chaos of the sea and wild weather. But gradually this longing for a coming together of land, sea and sky had migrated to settle on a woman who graced his daily, hourly thoughts; who was able to touch and caress him as rain and wind and sun can act upon the body in ever-changing ways. So when he was apart from her it was with such a longing that he found himself weighed down, filled brimfull.
 
In writing, in attempting to consider longing as a something the creative spirit might address, he felt profoundly grateful to the artist on the light blue bicycle whose her observations and invention had kept open a door he felt was closing on him. She had faced her own longing by bringing it into form, and through form into colour and texture, and then into a very particular play: an arrangement of objects and images for the mind to engage with – or not. He dared to feel an affinity with this artist because, like his own work, it did not seem wholly confident. It contained flaws of a most subtle kind, flaws that lent it a conviction and strength that he warmed to. It had not been massaged into correctness. The images and the textures, the directness of it, flowed through him back and forward just like the tides she had come far to observe on just a single day. He remembered then, when looking closely at the unprotected pieces on the walls, how his hand had moved to just touch its surfaces in exactly the way he would bring his fingers close to the body of the woman he loved so much, adored beyond any poetry, and longed for with all his heart and mind.

~SPANISH HUGGZ
Years of denial and anguish
Have succumbed my emotions
Nights full of loneliness
Days in total darkness
Tear drops fallen
Unspeakable pain
Heart wrenching thoughts
When will it End

The lies I still heart
The pain I still feel
The blood I still taste
The bruises I still see
Oh when will it end

I'm down,
Hit rock bottom
Stepped on like dirt
Thrown aside like garbage

I won't stay down
I refuse
I don't deserve this
I will stand once again
I need to find my inner peace
I need to find my strength

I'm stronger than this
I can rise once again
I can find my light again
No more self hatred
This is the End
I WILL RISE

~REBEL OF EDEN
And my shadow was his blanket
like the silver spoon in his mouth
the reeses he bit like a beast
and the milk was smooth to his lips
he drank of my soul down south
my curtains he swayed openly
where light had shed on his eyes
yet against my will he drank
of my wine he licked, my lips down low as if the candy store were miles away
I pushed and cried and tried to brush his mannish longing off of me
tried closing my curtains for calming thoughts and dulled razor blades
I can't put down the damage denied to have erased
beneath or upon my skin sizzle in teeth marks of the beasts
mirrors, blasted into pieces shared
for every man who stuck me
and every mark of the beasts only turned to memory
that I am allowed now
to forget and never repeat
and in wake, the curtains lay open for a new day
and this time, the curtains are the ones on my window, and not mines
.. I WILL RISE.

~JENNIE SULRZYCKI (Poetess Starr)
The dark grey skies
Consumed me
The tears in my eyes
Confused me.
My legs gave way
Collapsed
There I lay....
But death surely refused me!

On my back I laid
As regret
pricked my spine.
Daydreams
of nightmares
Poisoned my mind....
What have I done
with this life of mine!?

A small frightened girl
Cried out in the dark space,
I don't know her voice
I couldn't see her face...
Anxiety and anguish
Caused my heart to race!

In the shadows of the dark
Her silhouette
Shined bright...
Like thunder,
she spoke with authority...
"FIGHT!!!"

Slowly and wearily
I stood to my feet.
This little girl
This little person
She's the inner me!

No where left
To fall to from here
Nothing left
To fear....
But fear.

Calling upon my God
I remember!
His love is generous
His mercy,
Lasts forever!

The pains of this world,
Were placed here
for me.
To strengthen
my faith.
To set me free!

I will not be oppressed!
I refuse to be depressed!
This stress....
Just a test.
To prepare me
For what's next!
All the anxiety,
Laid to rest...
Finally realized the power
I possessed!
No longer feel cursed,
I know I am blessed!

I am stronger
Than this!
I'm my own person,
Not his!
Tired of receiving
His fist!
Look out baby,
I'm ******!

I opened my eyes,
Cleared the tears
I had cried.
A new chapter
In life.
No longer a victim
to the lies.
I WILL RISE!!!

PROLOGUE:

“’We must stop this brain working for twenty years.’” So said Mussolini’s Grand Inquisitor, his official Fascist prosecutor addressing the judge in Antonio Gramsci’s 1928 trial; so said the Il Duce’s Torquemada, ending his peroration with this infamous demand.’”  Gramsci, Antonio: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Introduction, translation from Italian and publishing by Quintin ***** & Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, New York, 1971.

BE IT RESOLVED: Whereas, I introduce this book with a nod of deep respect to Antonio Gramsci--an obscure but increasingly pertinent political scientist it would behoove us all to read and study today, I dedicate the book itself to my great grandfather and key family patriarch, Pietro Buonaiuto (1865-1940) of Moschiano, in the province of Avellino, in the region of Campania, southern Italy.

Let it be recognized that Pete Buonaiuto may not have had Tony Gramsci’s brain, but he certainly exhibited an extreme case of what his son--my paternal grandfather, Francesco Buonaiuto--termed: Testaduro. Literally, it means Hardhead, but connotes something far beyond the merely stubborn. We’re talking way out there in the unknown, beyond that inexplicable void where hotheaded hardheads regurgitate their next move, more a function of indigestion than thought. Given any situation, a Testaduro would rather bring acid reflux and bile to the mix than exercise even a skosh of gray muscle matter.  But there’s more. It gets worse.

To truly comprehend the densely-packed granite that is the Testaduro mind, we must now sub-focus our attention on the truly obdurate, extreme examples of what my paternal grandmother—Vicenza di Maria Buonaiuto—they called her Jennie--would describe as reflexive cutta-dey-noze-a-offa-to-spite-a-dey-face-a types. I reference the truly defiant, or T.D.—obviously short for both truly defiant and Testaduro. T.D.’s—a breed apart--smiling and sneering, laughing and, finally, begging their regime-appointed torture apparatchik (a career-choice getting a great deal of attention from the certificate mills--the junior colleges and vocational specialty institutes) mocking their Guantanamo-trained torturer: “Is that what you call punishment?  Is that all you ******* got?”

If, to assist comprehension, you require a literary frame of context, might I suggest you compare the Buonaiuto mind to Paul Lazzaro, Vonnegut’s superbly drawn Italian-American WWII soldier-lunatic with a passion for revenge, who kept a list of people who ****** with him, people he would have killed someday for a thousand dollars.

Go with me, Reader, go back with me to Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House-Five: “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time . . .”
It is long past the Tralfamadorian abduction and his friendship with Stony Stevenson. Billy is back in Germany, one of three dingbat American G.I.s roaming around beyond enemy lines.  Another of the three is Private Lazzaro, a former car thief and undeniable psychopath from Cicero, Illinois.

Paul Lazzaro:  “Anybody touches me, he better **** me, or I’m gonna have him killed. Revenge is the sweetest thing there is. People **** with me, and Jesus Christ are they ever ******* sorry. I laugh like hell. I don’t care if it’s a guy or a dame. If the President of the United States ****** around with me, I’d fix him good. Revenge is the sweetest thing in life. And nobody ever got it from Lazzaro who didn’t have it coming.  Anybody who ***** with me? I’m gonna have him shot after the war, after he gets home, a big ******* hero with dames climbing all over him. He’ll settle down. A couple of years ‘ll go by, and then one day a knock at the door. He’ll answer the door and there’ll be a stranger out there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so and so. When he says he is, the stranger’ll say, ‘Paul Lazzaro sent me.’ And then he’ll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the gut and walk away. Nobody ***** with Paul Lazzaro!”

(ENTER AUTHOR. HE SPEAKS: “Hey, Numb-nuts! Yes, you, my Reader. Do you want to get ****** into reading that Vonnegut blurb over and over again for the rest of the afternoon, or can I get you back into my manuscript?  That Paul Lazzaro thing was just my way of trying to give you a frame of reference, not to have you ******* drift off, walking away from me, your hand held tightly in nicotine-stained fingers. So it goes, you Ja-Bone. It was for comparison purposes.  Get it?  But, if you insist, go ahead and compare a Buonaiuto—any Buonaiuto--with the character, Paul Lazzaro. No comparison, but if you want a need a number—you quantitative ****--multiply the seating capacity of the Roman Coliseum by the gross tonnage of sheet pane glass that crystalized into small fixed puddles of glazed smoke, falling with the steel, toppling down into rubble on 9/11/2001. That’s right: multiply the number of Coliseum seats times a big, double mound of rubble, that double-smoking pile of concrete and rebar and human cadavers, formerly known as “The Twin Towers, World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, NYC.  It’s a big number, Numb-nuts! And it illustrates the adamantine resistance demonstrated by the Buonaiuto strain of the Testaduro virus. Shall we return to my book?)

The truth is Italian-Americans were never overzealous about WWII in the first place. Italians in America, and other places like Argentina, Canada, and Australia were never quite sure whom they were supposed to be rooting for. But that’s another story. It was during that war in 1944, however, that my father--John Felix Buonaiuto, a U.S. Army sergeant and recent Anzio combat vet decided to visit Moschiano, courtesy of a weekend pass from 5th Army Command, Naples.  In a rough-hewn, one-room hut, my father sat before a lukewarm stone fireplace with the white-haired Carmine Buonaiuto, listening to that ancient one, spouting straight **** about his grandfather—Pietro Buonaiuto--my great-grandfather’s past. Ironically, I myself, thirty yeas later, while also serving in the United States Army, found out in the same way, in the same rough-hewn, one-room hut, in front of the same lukewarm fireplace, listening to the same Carmine Buonaiuto, by now the old man and the sea all by himself. That’s how I discovered the family secret in Moschiano. It was 1972 and I was assigned to a NATO Cold War stay-behind operation. The operation, code-named GLADIO—had a really cool shield with a sword, the fasces and other symbols of its legacy and purpose. GLADIO was a clandestine anti-communist agency in Italy in the 1970s, with one specific target:  Il Brigate Rosso, the Red Brigades.  This was in my early 20s. I was back from Vietnam, and after a short stint as an FBI confidential informant targeting campus radicals at the University of Miami, I was back in uniform again. By the way, my FBI gig had a really cool codename also: COINTELPRO, which I thought at the time had something to do with tapping coin operated telephones. Years later, I found out COINTELPRO stood for counter-intelligence program.  I must have had a weakness for insignias, shields and codenames, because there I was, back in uniform, assigned to Army Intelligence, NATO, Italy, “OPERATION GLADIO.“

By the way, Buonaiuto is pronounced:

Bwone-eye-you-toe . . . you ignorant ****!

Oh yes, prepare yourself for insult, Kemosabe! I refuse to soft soap what ensues.  After all, you’re the one on trial here this time, not Gramsci and certainly not me. Capeesh?

Let’s also take a moment, to pay linguistic reverence to the language of Seneca, Ovid & Virgil. I refer, of course, to Latin. Latin is called: THE MOTHER TONGUE. Which is also what we used to call both Mary Delvecchio--kneeling down in the weeds off Atlantic Avenue--& Esther Talayumptewa --another budding, Hopi Corn Maiden like my mother—pulling trains behind the creosote bush up on Black Mesa.  But those are other stories.

LATIN: Attention must be paid!

Take the English word obdurate, for example—used in my opening paragraph, the phrase truly obdurate: {obdurate, ME, fr. L. obduratus, pp. of obdurare to harden, fr. Ob-against + durus hard –More at DURING}.

Getting hard? Of course you are. Our favorite characters are the intransigent: those who refuse to bend. Who, therefore, must be broken: Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke comes to mind. Or Paul Newman again as Fast Eddie, that cocky kid who needed his wings clipped and his thumbs broken. Or Paul Newman once more, playing Eddie Felson again; Fast Eddie now slower, a shark grown old, deliberative now, no longer cute, dimples replaced with an insidious sneer, still fighting and hustling but in shrewder, more subtle ways. (Credit: Scorsese’s brilliant homage The Color of Money.)

The Color of Money (1986) - IMDb www.imdb.com/title/tt0090863 Internet MovieDatabase Rating: 7/10 - ‎47,702 votes. Paul Newman and Helen Shaver; still photo: Tom Cruise in The Color of Money (1986) Still of Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986). Full Cast & Crew - ‎Awards - ‎Trivia - ‎Plot Summary

Perhaps it was the Roman Catholic Church I rebelled against.  The Catholic Church: certainly a key factor for any Italian-American, a stinger, a real burr under the saddle, biting, setting off insurrection again and again. No. Worse: prompting Revolt! And who could blame us? Catholicism had that spooky Latin & Incense going for it, but who wouldn’t rise up and face that Kraken? The Pope and his College of Cardinals? A Vatican freak show—a red shoe, twinkle-toe, institutional anachronism; the Curia, ferreting out the good, targeting anything that felt even half-way good, classifying, pronouncing verboten, even what by any stretch of the imagination, would be deemed to be merely kind of pleasant, slamming down that peccadillo rubber-stamp. Sin: was there ever a better drug? Sin? Revolution, **** yeah!  Anyone with an ounce of self-respect would have gone to the barricades.

But I digress.

March 20th
I couldn't sleep
Life was good
Mom got rid of that piece **** car
We had money again
I had a new Daddy
And it was the most my sister had been stable
I was thinking how my birthday was only 31 days away
I would be turning 10
But that was not what had kept me up
It was the paranoia of something bad happening
life was too good
to quiet.
I didn't understand
I wouldn't stop images in my head
Of of being robbed,death,seizures reoccurring...
I couldn't sleep
Not a wink.
I never understood why.
March 10th
Mom kept coming home late
I became scared if something happened
I had a sensation telling me that she was in a car accident
Or she was going to be in one
Would I be in the car?
She came in and I broke down
Crying
I told her that I was afraid
Afraid of her getting into a car accident
Of her getting hurt
She said that it wasn't going to happen
She would call me, now that she understood
April 10th
Excited that 11 more days to go
Til I  turned 10
Finally I was going to be out of the single digits
I would be a double digit
I would be older and cooler and get more respect
I could hang out with the older kids
My sister Emmy and I
were hungry and bored
So we decided for once to get along
And watch a movie til mom got home from work
Mom was a 35 year old teacher who worked with drop outs,delinquents, and victims
I thought of them all as my family
The movie wasn't over and we called 100 times
Wonder where she was
I got scared
Headache
tear eyed
heart sank
felt weak
but brave
THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK
My new Dad came running down the stairs
Before he could say it.
Before he could
I already knew
I jumped up and said "MOM WAS IN A CAR ACCIDENT!!!"
He looked at me funny for a second and then said "Yeah."
He told us to go over a friends house
We could of spent the night but I couldn't tolerate it
Turns out she was trying to make life better for us.
She wanted to go work with autistic kids, in a different school...
With a better pay and better hours.
A better life for us.
Not that she didn't love her job.
She wasn't leaving her 2nd family.
She was doing this for us.
April 12th
It was the longest 2 days of my life
It felt like 2 weeks or 2 months
That was when time became slower than slow
She was bruised,cut,and broken
Not just physically.
Emotionally was the worst pain over all.
To be 9 not 10 just quiet yet
To see your mother in pain
As she cried on my shoulder
And her little solider was out to war
So her older son couldn't come home anymore
He couldn't be there for her
In her time of need
He was fighting for peace
But peace is what needed to be given
Not just her, but to all of us
I was scared ,But brave none the less
There was darkness all around
Time was slow
To this day
April 10th is the most hated day
The day where I almost lost my mother
But someone else lost theirs
She is still in pain
Emotionally is still the worst
As she cries on my shoulder
I know
I understand
That
WE WERE LUCKY
WE WERE ALL HURT
AND THIS PAIN...
Will be taken to the grave.
But while we are alive.
And we all survived.
I can see the light again.

Shannon, Mariah, Serena, Maria
Meridia, Midian, Sharon, Alliah
Rochelle, Camille, Rose, Halo
Trenna, Jessica, Ashley, Georgia
Marla, Olivia, Sofia, India
Daniella, Diana, Christina, Caroline
Isabella, Amelia, Amanda, Matilda
Nadine, Haley, Bailey, Francine
Eliza, Annabelle, Kathryn, Sandra
Melinda, Audrey, Aubrey, Emily
Tara, Emma, Ginny, Kathleen
Josephine, Helena, Charlotte, Laura
Chelsea, Arkady, Megan, Kelsey
Kayla, Karliah, Moana, Vivien
Kaysea, Macy, Stacy, Lorraine
Theresa, Felicia, Cecilia, Darlene
Holly, Brianna, Alexa, Ariel
Marianne, Miranda, Jennie, Coral
Korra, Daisy, Penelope, Rayne
Zoey, Cassandra, Grace, Stephanie

Leave it to my very best friend,
To slap the silliness right out of me.
And with a few all knowing words,
Bring me right back down to reality.

I always heed her words of advice.
She has a better perspective than me.
And she pulls me back just a little,
When I stand too close and can't see.

And she offers a clear reminder,
Of the path that I pledged to take,
And to her I am forever grateful.
For saving me so much heartbreak.

She lifts me up so that I can see,
The bigger picture from up above.
And with that view I remember,
I'm not ready to fall in love.

She says there is a long road ahead,
With opportunities galore.
And I better not ever settle again!
Unless I am very sure!

To take my time, there is no rush,
Just have fun along the way!
And always give a hundred percent,
And the time will be right one day!

I'm somewhere between heartache and agony,
Where your soul feels it's being crushed mercilessly
Yet, a raging anger
Burning its way through my body and melting my brain
Singing my insides;
Unable to think rationally

Trying to ignore you is like trying not to breathe
I can't help but look at your face,
And to tell myself this isn't real


10/30/19