Little Southern boy with a tow head of hair
Runs home for comfort to be told he is loved
Instead he is stripped and put into a tub
Scrubbed clean to blood by his faux mother's cruel hand
Turn the page

Adventures abound as the young boy grows
Fantasies to weave, and secret places to hide
But deeper secrets were so painfully hidden
And burned to the core with never an answer
Turn the page

Into his teen years, the mother so cruel
Dressed her son in bruises and bloodstains too
And the father who should have been the young man's hero
Cowered and  cringed in her heavy handed wake
Turn the page

Soon with signature to paper, to get the hell out of town
The army became his ticket, or so he had imagined
Discharged and AWOL, into a new hell he crawled
And he wallowed there, for a time at least
Turn the page

So lost and alone, in life's fight for survival
The boy was desperate, he needed to belong
But no one was there to give the foothold he needed
And those who reached out he soon left behind
Turn the page

As years march on, the boy more than grown
Can now find the good that was always within
He does all that he knows to make needed amends
Some questions still haunt him, though less of a burden
Now close the book gently-its not yet the end