Month: April 2024

In the sixties he ate the bark off of trees
And everything edible in the forest,
Including insects, roots and flowers.
Never ate those processed foods
So abundant in the western world.
He saw the animals in the forest
As brothers and sisters.
He understood the howls of wolves.
He could interpret the sounds of bears,
And he described himself as a bear whisperer
And considered bears as part of his family.
One day he consumed a bucket of dandelions,
One of his bear relative’s favorite treats.
And his whispers and kinship meant nothing
When the bear smelled the dandelions inside him
And gorged himself on the human dandelion treat,
Like a kid eating a chocolate covered ice cream bar.

Bob Boyd

I was living the dream
A Rock and Roller
Starting at age 16
Toured all over the USA
Opened for some big name bands
Wrote the songs for my band
Knew one day we’d have a hit
On the road for 50 years
Never wrote that big hit
Not even a one hit wonder
Realized I was never going
To be a big international star
I dreamed I’d be at age 16
At least I lived the dream

Bob Boyd

A company head like ancient Nero
Fiddling around with employees.
Her music, demeaning outbursts
Discordant verbal assaults
That caused the audiences of
Workers to quit year after year.

The cost: a bad reputation
All over the city and the loss
Of many high quality employees.
But like Nero, she didn’t reform
And kept blowing good people out the door.
Some people are just born tyrants,
Who no more than a psychopath
Can change his behavior are
Locked into theirs.

But the world goes on and
Devalued employees find
Better jobs elsewhere. So
At least the story has
A happy ending, except
For the Nero-like tyrant.

Bob Boyd

The sun fell from the sky
The moon blew up
Stars scattered throughout the universe
Nukes destroyed the earth planet
The remains of which spun
Aimlessly in the cosmos.
Nostradamus was right,
But no problem
The Dance of Shiva
Will start again and
Humans will resume
Their evolutionary
Journeys.

Bob Boyd

Outraged by increasing, out of control crime,
even women getting punched in the streets,
My brother and I decided to go into superhero action.
I dressed like Batman. He dressed like Robin.
We both had years of martial arts training
And from lifting weights since childhood,
We were incredibly strong and imposingly buffed.

As a team, we patrolled the streets of our city every night.
We kicked the crap out of a rapist, stopped a robbery of an old lady.
We became crime fighting legends even on the evening news.
Our mission was exhilarating, cleaning up the streets of vermin.
We fought criminals all over the city. We stopped more crime than the cops.
All the glory ended when we caught a street walker trying to solicit.
We were going to report her to the police, but my brother said no.

In a save the princess knight mode, he told her he could save her from the streets,
And I could see they had a love connection that would go nowhere.
Shocked, I tried to rein in his delusional lovesickness and save him
From making the dumbest mistake of his life and the possible end of our team.
He starts going out with her and says she’s really a good girl;
she just had a hard life and that led her to degrading herself in the streets.
He quits the team.

She convinces him freelance crime fighting is too dangerous,
As if her career path wasn’t loaded with dangers and dangerous characters.
After a month of fighting crime without him, I felt like the Lone Ranger
Instead of Batman. I couldn’t go on without our duo, without my backup.
A year later, the street walker turned good girl leaves my brother
To become a nun in a convent hundreds of miles away.

My brother goes crazy, puts on a Superman costume, gets drunk,
And tries to fly off the top of the six story apartment building he lives in.
On the way down, he sees the street walker, turned good girl, turned nun
Coming back to him. She folds her hands in prayer and prays out loud, and my
Brother floats down into her arms. Maybe that nun stuff gave her some
Potent prayer power like a super nun hero.

Bob Boyd

Remember when I saved your life when
You fell of that boat and could not swim,
And the current began pulling you down?

Remember when I brought you that
Carnation for our senior prom and
You said we’d be together forever?

Remember how when you went to
That fancy college and felt you
Were becoming too good for me?

Remember how I said you were
Becoming too stuck up for me
And I never called you again?

I remember all those times
And often think of how things
Might have been.

Bob Boyd

His parent always said,
Why can’t you be like him?
He’s always helping his father,
He’s a model kid.
He grew to hate that model kid
He could never be like.
But he found out he was
better than him in one way.
Playing a game of hockey
On a pond near where he lived
The model kid tried to stick
His hockey stick into
another player’s ice skate
Who had gotten past his defense.
Though in his parents’ eyes,
He wasn’t as good as the model kid
He knew he’d never be a cheater like him.

Bob Boyd

When she presented she was magical.
Her words flowed into the audience,
Captivating, hypnotic, sugar sweet.
Her knowledge, massive, amazing,
She educated many. Enlightened many lives.
Whether you were a PhD or a high school dropout
Both of you completely understood her topic.
Her presentations had that quality,
Unpretentious, real, beneficial to everyone.
Her name is Wanda Moone. You probably
Never heard of her. You probably never
Will, a loss I wish you never missed.

Bob Boyd

I like crows
Their color,
Their sounds,
Their smarts,
But I don’t
Like how
They savage
Birds nests
When I see
Smaller birds
Flying after
Them.

But I guess
This is just
Nature
Birds and
Animals
Just doing
What they
Do.

Maybe
Like we
Kill and
Eat animals.
So maybe
Though
Most of us
Are good
People and
Wouldn’t
Savage little
Birds nests
We’re no
Better than
Crow behavior
When we
Savage and
Consume
Animals.

Bob Boyd

She told me she’d been a witch in a former life.
I had no quarrel with that but I doubted it.
We got involved and all was grand.
She began dressing in all black clothes
And bought herbs and began casting spells.
I had no quarrel with that and liked the herbs
And was grateful she didn’t wear a pointed black hat.
She adopted a black cat she called her familiar.
I had no quarrel with that and liked the cat.
One day a road raged driver shot me in the arm.
She said he seriously will pay for that and to
Forget about the often unjust courts of law.
Because the shooter was the son of a rich man.
She had a point but I was determined to see
Justice done to the man who nearly killed me.
She said I put a spell on him; this will never go to court.
I didn’t believe her but had no quarrel with her intent.
A day later the son of a rich man shooter,
A young man with good health died of a massive heart attack.
I had no quarrel with that because I think it was only a coincidence.
But ….

Bob Boyd

Today I stood at your grave
My tears watering the flowers
I brought for you.

I lost my faith in God the
Day your screwed up
Ex murdered you.

He’s in a grave too, his fate
Worse than yours and
More than deserved.

Now I wander city streets
Sometimes talking to you
In my head.

I’ve gone a little crazy
From thinking about how
You’re in that grave

Just a corpse rotting away
In that cold ground and
Gone from me forever.

I have wondered why this
Terrible nightmare had to happen
To you and me.

I wish I could be dead like
You and end this misery in
My ever aching heart

I’ve thought about killing myself;
It’s too hard to go on without you,
But I haven’t the guts to do it.

My friends say time heals all wounds
But this wound will stay open
For the rest of my miserable life.

I just can’t go on without you and
I don’t want to go on in a Godless
World you’re no longer in.

Bob Boyd

A fan spins above my head cooling me,
The earth is spinning too, maybe in sync.
But is the gargantuan earth planet
Spinning slower, which could account
For why I cannot feel the spinning?
And I know it’s better I cannot,
My balance isn’t as good as it once was.
And maybe the feel of a spinning earth
Would give me chronic vertigo
that would drive me insanely mad.
As I’m writing this, I’m wondering if
All the planets spin at the same speed,
And why can’t they just remain still.
Now my mind is spinning with thoughts,
Like an assembly line thoughts machine
Cranking out thoughts unceasingly.
So I’m going to just enjoy the cool breeze of
The fan, forget the cosmic stuff, and end this poem.

Bob Boyd

Heard about people having their
heads frozen after they died.
What was the point of that?
They believed in the far future
Scientists would reanimate their heads
And provide them with new, fresh bodies,
Probably manufactured in laboratories.
This poses the question can these braindead heads
Become jump started with their marbles intact?
Perhaps those who probably paid through the nose,
Pun intended, for these Frankensteinian, guillotine-like services
Believed not in a lifeforce animating their living brains and bodies,
If their severed, frozen heads could be unfrozen and woken up.
I believe they’d have a horror movie on the hands they wouldn’t have,
A spiritless brain, eyes that couldn’t open, a mouth that couldn’t talk,
A comatose head unfit for any kind of body.

Bob Boyd

Not being controlled
Not having anyone run interference
on what you are achieving
Not essentially held hostage by
the need for a paycheck
Not working at something you
don’t like but must to survive
Not having to take any nonsense
Not needing to do things you’d prefer not to
like needless time wasting meetings
Not being a slave to the clock
Not needing weekend breaks
Not having to put up with the possibility
of a difficult coworker
Not suffering any slights by
an ungrateful boss

Bob Boyd

He saw her photo in the news
35 and dead
In an auto accident
Something about her
Captured his heart
A nameless
Undefinable thing
He found the location of her grave
Visited her with flowers
He placed at her grave
Felt compelled to keep visiting her grave
It was an afterlife infatuation
That grew and grew and grew
Two months later she began appearing in his dreams
Every night a dream date
Now he knows for sure
He’ll be with her when he dies

Bob Boyd

Out of all the ice cream flavor choices
I’m trying to think of my favorite one
Is it Vanilla Chocolate Almond
Or Moose Tracks
Or Peanut Butter Cup
Or Cookies n Cream
No
None of them will do
Let me think
A little more
Tap into my
Presently bankrupt
Taste memory banks
Ah ha!
I got it here we go
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Bob Boyd

Imagine when people were persecuted for reading Bibles.
Imagine before that when only the elite priests could read
Biblical truths and teaching, psalms, proverbs, and more.
Some of the non-Catholic Bible Readers burned at the stake.
Protestant martyrs, each one hunted down and murdered.
William Tyndaly translated the Bible into English
And was strangled and burned at the stake.
In 1401 Oxford professors burned at the stake too,
Their crime, translating the Bible into English.
I often wish the Lord above could have intervened
And saved the thousands upon thousands tortured and killed
By those that perverted Christianity and the Catholic Religion
Thank God those days are gone now.

Bob Boyd

Thousands dead on
The blood-laden
Battlefield strewn
With the corpses
Of young men who
Had futures but
Now dead never to
Return home
Never seen by
Loved ones again

They fought a senseless
War for a dictator safe
Far from the battlefield
He sent those dead
Men into battle like
Pawns on a chessboard
Their lives insignificant
To him

Bob Boyd

Sammy had been in the Air Force in Germany
For three long years, and he was close to
going home discharged from the Air Force.
He counted the dwindling days by saying
So many days and a wake up call like
“I got 4 days and a wake up call!”
But beneath all that jubilation, he worried
About the plane home to America crashing
Before he ever got to his home shore.
When the wake up call came and Sammy
Was bound to America, the last time he’d
Ever see Germany or the Air Force again
The plane kept hitting jarring air pockets,
One so violent people screamed. But
After the bumpy trip and the scares
The plane landed safely in American,
And Sammy sighed with relief and felt like
Kissing the ground in the airport until,
In what America has become known for,
A psycho guy with a gun splattered bullets
All over the airport and Sammy took one in the chest.
He died on the frantic trip to the Emergency Room
And never got another wake up call.

Bob Boyd

Martha, John’s coworker, chided him
For not giving the can factory they
Both worked for a two week notice
When he stormed off the job
After an outrageous slight
By the owner of the company.
Ironically, a month later Martha
got fired without even a day’s notice
By the toxic owner of the can company.
Shocked, she wondered how she was
going to pay her rent and all her bills,
And how long it would take to find another job
With the possibility of a negative reference.

Bob Boyd