CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR: of the EBook THE BULLIED, by Alan Johnson
(The Nonromantic Man is the art form most often described as a character sketch.  It falls in the realm of poetry, which I call poessay.  For it is not poetry by itself or an essay.)

The Nonromantic Man
Non-romanticism is the inability to overwhelm one’s ignorance of the opposite *** needs or desires. The non-romantic man is one who buys his non-pool playing wife a pool table and soon thereafter invites his friends over every weekend to play pool. He calls women ******* and ‘hoes. He rises late at night to fix a sandwich, leaves the spilled condiments for his woman to clean in the morning, then after a cigarette, with mustard still being on his breath, wakes her up for a *******. He gains weight and then demands that she go on a diet. In harmony with his poor values, he neglects to compliment the new sexed up dress that she is wearing but does notice that she is wearing too much makeup for him. He has to be reminded of her birthday or any other should special engagement. The result his gift is not well thought out, so he buys her a cheap necklace just like the times before. He has no taste for poetry, sensual lyrics or the practice of setting the ambiance which moistens the trail of splendor. He takes his woman out to dinner and complains about the dinner’s high prices, and work, and her in-sensitiveness to his problems, and…At least once a month, he rolls off the top of her and falls asleep while she stares at the ceiling and prays for a difference.

From the moment we met on that eventful night,
I've felt something for her unlike I've felt for any other soul.
Her hair was curled, her makeup was neat.
She was beautiful.
She smiled at me a special smile,
And it was that smile I would become accustom to.
She was surrounded by a crowd of exceptional people.
They were a kind of wild and raunchy people I hadn't been exposed to.
Amongst them, she shined like a diamond,
As if she was God and they were all descendants of Lucifer.

I soon became aware that her and I could relate.
Sometimes outcasted by others, we bonded in our strife.
We led similar lives and connected strongly with each other in a friendly, nonromantic way.
Whilst her fellow souls were overflowing with disorder,
We held each other and comforted each other from the unsafe conditions of teenage darkness.
She was misunderstood and so was I.
We were meant to live much simpler lives,
But in our struggle to prosper in what we thought was divine,
We made our lives much more complicated.

She watched me as I drove those familiar roads,
And listened as I talked of my blues.
She empathized with me.
We always got along the best.
Faced with a plethora of teenage hardships,
We always found our way back to sanity.
We always found our way back to each other.
She was everything to me,
And to this day, she still shines like a diamond.
Now, her smile is more than just a smile.
It's a pathway to serenity.