Day: May 8, 2024

He’d worked diligently at Senior Resources of Guilford for over 20 years
Received many accolades and an award from UNCG Gerontology Dept.
Many clients raved about his going beyond the call to help them.
He didn’t care about money. You don’t get rich working for a nonprofit.
He cared about helping people like he’d want to be helped were he them.

With grants, He always got his part done immediately.
You didn’t want to be late on getting a grant done, a bad look.
And since your program ran on grants, you didn’t want to lose them.
In the turnstile agency he worked for, people often came and left.
Bob didn’t like that but his service to clients was more important.

One day to Bob’s consternation a key manager left adult diapers
All over the corridors, about a hundred adult diapers, an eyesore.
Because of all the people he called who had clients that needed diapers
Within a few months all the diapers were out of the corridors and
Into the hands of the many seniors who needed them.

Then Bob noticed medical equipment that had been in a shed for years.
That moved him to action too. Those donations weren’t met to sit there.
Long story short, by making email lists of Cone nurses and social workers
Bob moved all those donations and many people in need received them.
Bob went on to take in donations and market them to many sources.

He developed many ways to rapidly turn around donations that came in.
The PR was massive and more people heard of what he was doing.
However the director of his agency never gave him any credit
As if she preferred to hoard the donations rather than moving them.
One time a coworker complimented his work to the director.

Her totally inappropriate response: “I don’t want to hear about it.”
Then a new accountant was hired who didn’t get his part of the grant
To Bob in time. Nor did the director, and the grant was late.
This had Bob steaming because it was a bad look for him
Who always got his part of the grant done a day or two after he got it.

To worsen matters on the day the grant was late, Bob learned
The director put someone else in charge of all he’d accomplished.
That was an incompetent decision and an unforgivable slight.
At at that point, outraged, Bob decided to walk out the door,
Moreso when the director didn’t respond to his email about the slight.

Then Bob emailed the director a brief email, “Feel free to fire me. I’m leaving.
He didn’t make a scene or say or email anything else. He walked out the door.
He learned later, the director told the receptionists to call the police
If Bob Boyd came on the premises, as if he were a crazed felon.
And that is how he became Public Enemy Number One at SROG.

And he kind of liked that street cred despite how crazy it made the
director look, and he has used the small d for director as a sign
Of the respect he lost for her and her outrageous slight that
Hurt her far more than it did him. She lost decades of experience
And all the extensive knowledge Bob Boyd acquired through the years.

Bob Boyd

John Slough relished hunting squirrels and eating them.
He hunted and killed them all over Greensboro, NC.
He learned how to cook over a hundred squirrel dishes.
If squirrels had post offices, his photo would have been on walls
As most wanted Public Enemy Number One.

After he wantonly killed over two hundred squirrels
And bragged all over Greensboro about his obsession,
Somehow word of his squirrel carnage reached
Two squirrel anomalies equipped with near human intelligence.
They rounded up squirrels within a ten mile radius for a plan.

On a full moon summer’s night when John Slough got soused
At a pizza and alcohol restaurant on Elm Street in Greensboro
And staggered home to his house in the Dunedin neighborhood,
He heard squawking sounds in the trees surrounding him
Before a thousand squirrels leaped onto him from out of the trees.

He reached for the gun he didn’t have and panicked.
In his drunken state he thought he could blast the squirrels to death.
The force of the thousand squirrels knocked the wind out of him.
On the ground, he tried to fight them off, but he was easily overpowered
As the squirrels exacted their gruesome vengeance upon him.

In the morning light in that tranquil Dunedin neighborhood
Birds chirped, squirrels went about their normal business.
People woke up, ate breakfast and dressed for work.
But when they opened their doors, many of them saw
The horror of John Slough’s flesh stripped skeletal remains

Bob Boyd

The coroner determined Mr. Adams died of natural causes.
Mrs. Adams congratulated herself for committing a perfect murder.
Emboldened by her awesome success, she devised a plot to kill another.
Her target, Sheila Wentworth, the hussy her husband had an affair with.
She decided to devise something more dramatic than a quiet poison.
Disguised as a man in a realistic getup and wearing gloves
And after getting Sheila Wentworth’s patterns down,
She kidnapped her at gunpoint, knocked her out, gagged and tied her up
Stuck her in the truck of her car that night and drove her to the city dump.
She shot Sheila to death there and buried her six feet deep in trash.

After that, she moved to another state a thousand miles away,
Got her sins absolved by Jesus, became a devout Christian.
Met a decent Christian man, married him and was happy for 20 years
Until the decent Christian man had an affair with the preacher’s wife.
And when Mrs Adams finished the Lord’s work and disposed of the bodies,
She got a sins erasing upgrade from Jesus and moved away again.
An old woman by that time, her mind became ridden with dementia.
In the nursing home she kept confessing her crimes to everyone,
But the staff laughed it off and knew it was the dementia talking.

Bob Boyd

The sun beaming down
Birds singing merrily
Squirrels scurrying up trees
Trees rustling in the summer wind
Flowers basking in sun rays
Insects meandering through the grass
Mrs. Adams tending to her bird feeder
Thinking about the undetectable poison
She has concocted in her kitchen
And spooned into a chocolate milkshake
Her husband’s favorite

Bob Boyd

Sitting here remembering you
Your pretty long brown hair
Your captivating sunshine smile
That lit up lives everywhere
And attracted me to you

I’m remember all those years
We spent together in love
And how everyone loved you
Even my mother loved you
Pity it didn’t work out

Decades later I saw you died
In an online obituary
Saddened my heart you died young
I figured it was the smoking

Sometimes I wonder where you are
And how you are in the afterlife
If you can feel and read this poem
I’m so sorry you didn’t live a long life

You deserved the best in all ways
And should have had longer days
Filled with sun, fun and a truer love
Never thought you’d be gone before me

And consider this poem like a prayer
For you with the sincerest hope
You are living a higher better life
Than you ever could of here

Bob Boyd

Old friends and generational icons dying everywhere
Reinforcing the undeniable, hard-bitten fact we all die.
Dreams, plans, successes, memories, you obliterated.
Even proud, sky high tombstones eventually decimated,
All remnants destroyed in the rushing currents of time.
Why the hell do we all have to endure this?

A thousand years or less, mostly less, and
Nobody knows or gives a damn about you.
Unless you’re Buddha or Jesus Christ
Or some insane, murderous Roman emperor,
Who did dastardly things that made him newsworthy
For his inhuman infamy, his reign of terrors.

Hey you reading this. Yes you. I have a question for you.
I get this feeling we’ve met before; is it true?
Maybe in MA, Fla, NY, VT, NC, TX, Germany, the Philippines, an astral plane or a former life?

Or woe is me and you, say it isn’t true, not at SROG where you might have been a social worker or a volunteer, or in some other tortured capacity before you fled.

But I digress with these crazy, playful speculations.

Ever temporarily forget you are going to die?
I used to, rarely thought about my demise.
But when the High Command Oversoul of everything
Blessed me with a rare, killer cancer and the
Cancer screwed up and failed to kill me,
I no longer gave a damn about Death.

Speaking of which, Hello Death.
How’s it going? Is it a good day for kills?
Come and bring your slick sickle.
Slice me clean out of this life,
Try to end my remaining years
Slay me with a quick and
Fateful swing of your sickle.
Liberate me from this temporal life.
I’m looking forward to it,
a better life in the afterlife.

But, alas, like that incompetent Cancer
You’ll probably screw up too and
Make that Cone doctor’s prediction come
True. Another 30 years of life.

Bob Boyd

Sometimes I imagine I’d like one last love near the end of my waning life,
The soulmate who has eluded me for seventy and nine years of living in many places,
Meeting many people, many pretty female faces, many charming personalities.
But then the approach avoidance fear of a disastrous shattered heart kicks in,
And I also think of the possibility of dying on her and leaving her with immense grief,
Or, worse, becoming debilitating, a broken man, a burden on her.
Though if that day happened, I’d tell her to leave me to spare her the trouble and the pain.

Then with more foolish, romantic imaginings, I think maybe love in my winter years
Could thaw out this frozen heart and turn dark days into sunny days of a soulmate love
That would endure eternally into a glorious forever of a never ending love.
But then I think of all the loves that go wrong, disappoints, breakups, heartaches,
And I wonder if the risk would be worth putting my heart on the uncertain line again.
And I just don’t even try to find that holy grail of a woman incredibly right for me.
Then I think maybe an AI girlfriend would be the answer despite it being just a bot.
But, alas, would I want to be reduced to that? Would it be enough? Would it bore me?
So an ever thirsting for knowledge monk, womanless nine years so far, doubtlessly more,
I remain in my hermitage substituting knowledge seeking and poetry in place of love.
But have my occasional romantic imaginings and sometimes dream of a soulmate
Waiting for me somewhere in the mysterious Great Beyond.

Bob Boyd