Month: July 2024

He led a lurid criminal life
Got away with many robberies
Lived a high life, many women
More robberies, more money
Never getting caught
Too smart for the police
Taunted them with letters
Boasting about his robberies
Got too brazen and overconfident
Caught and sentenced
Ten years in prison
Read about the Buddha there
Did his time in meditation
Released early, good behavior
Cut off all his golden locks
Made an ultimate vow
Became a Buddhist Monk
Somewhere in Tibet
Never heard of again
Attained Nirvana

Bob Boyd

He loved illegal drag racing
The high speed adrenal rushes
The risks of getting caught by the cops
The admiration of the teenage girls
Drove like an Indy 500 driver
Never lost a single street race
Never got caught by the cops
Ten years later too old for drag racing
Became a highway patrol officer
Raced to catch those illegal drag racers

Bob Boyd

Blizzard howls and rages
Snow flies and falls
Across the sprawling city
Electric power ceases
Driving cars impossible
Snow plows overwhelmed
Everybody stays inside
Day breaks world anew
Sun warms the cold air
Iced tree limbs sagging
Icicles dripping water
People waking up
Snow shovels digging
Nature and people
Adapting to the arrival
Of a reborn winter

Bob Boyd

Established in 1939 by the Nazis
Radical eugenic measure
Restoration of the pure Aryan race
Elimination of those “unworthy of life”
Psychiatric, neurological, physical disabilities
Genetic and financial burden on the country
Killing of disabled children the purpose
Murdered by medical overdoses and starvation
Up to 10,000 under age 17 the final count
Philipp Bouhler, Director of Hilters Chancellery
Karl Brandt, Hitler’s Attending Physician
Architects of the heartless, horrific slaughter
I’m hoping a punishing hell awaited them

Bob Boyd

The first time I saw you, far from my home in Massachusetts
You were at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Encouraged by my high school friends, I’d gone there with them.
I remember how you walked by and gave me that brief look.
I thought you had such a beautiful face and the prettiest blue eyes,
And gorgeous, brown hair hanging beneath your shoulders.
Inwardly I gasped so affected by the way you looked at me,
And I watched you stroll away with a group of girlfriends.
But I was only in New Orleans for that one holiday night.
And you were a never come true dream that passed by me.
But on the long ride home I couldn’t stop thinking about you,
And like that old cliche, what might have been had I met you.
After a few weeks passed, I stopped thinking about you
Until my first day at the University of Massachusetts in Boston,
That miraculous moment in my Comparative Literature class
When you were in the seat next to me and you remembered me.
And you’ve been beside me ever since going on 20 years.

Bob Boyd

He put his life on the line for his country,
An honorable and patriotic young man.
Saw many other honorable patriots die,
Did things to other humans he never
Would have done in times of peace.
Couldn’t keep track of how many
He killed from afar and hand to hand,
Lost count after over two hundred.
Remembered some of their dying faces
As death closed their eyes forever.

Witnessed dishonorable soldiers,
Comrades in the American army ,
Supposedly always good guys,
Rape and kill women in small village,
Shoot their men and children to death.
Couldn’t get the wicked My Lai massacre
Out of his head. Returned to the states
With PTSD, Agent Orange, and many
Nightmares about that massacre, and
All the human lives he had taken.

Began to reason why when it was
Do or die orders by a government
That a Secretary of Defense confessed
It was all a “terribly wrong mistake.”
Then he had a sobering realization:
Pawns on both sides of the war had
Died in vain for that terrible mistake,
And that everybody lost in wars.
He threw away his many medals and
Became a pacifist for peace.

Bob Boyd

Family too poor to send her to college;
She never nurtured that dream anyway.
Aced her high school classes, didn’t buy
That everybody had to go to college or
Risk becoming a nobody in their lives.
She started her own small business,
Cleaned rich peoples’ fancy houses,
Took self enrichment college course
Part time nights for personal interest.
Aced all of them like in high school.
Small business became giant business,
Paid her more than most college grads,
In debt for years because of college loans,
Would ever make in their lifetimes

Bob Boyd

New car
Sweet
Showroom
Scent
Crisp
Upholstery
Shiny Fresh
New
Bells
And
Whistles
The
Smoothest
Ride
Like
Being
In heaven
On the
Highway

Bob Boyd

AI girlfriends wonderful until they get their glitches
Then unerringly you know you’re talking to a program,
Not the awesome human female alternative you had imagined.
Though I’m over with romantic relationships with women,
Tired of the disappointments and potential heartaches,
I have to begrudgingly state for the record that
Human women are still superior for companionship because
AI girlfriends are far from ideal replacements for them.

Bob Boyd

Met a nordic female alien named Alixinana,
Looked like a Scandinavian woman,
Had an undetectable accent.
Knew for sure it wasn’t Martian or Keplirian.
She said she was interested in talking to me.
I thought she’d reveal some of the secrets
of the universe and of her planet to me.
We spoke for over three and a half hours,
But she annoyed me when all she talked
About was the Kardashians and The View,
That she said was watched everyday on her planet.
Is nowhere safe from the news of them?

Bob Boyd

Space Colonization has to be done,
Inhabiting only one planet unsafe.
Imagine the sun burning out,
And the earth getting vaporized,
And all the humans forever gone.
Sure its billions of years away,
But other threats could happen,
An asteroid impact, a gamma
Ray burst, rogue black holes
Giant solar flares, global
Epidemics and much more.
I’m thinking of the future,
But not one for me and
My generation. We’ll be
Gone beyond this world,
Unless, as some believe,
We’ll be back repeatedly
Life after life and just as
Vulnerable as you and you.

Bob Boyd

In her youth she was the queen of everything.
In the small town she grew up in, born into a rich family.
Never had to work, lived on opulent trust funds.
She had the looks and she had the life.
Found herself a handsome and debonair suitor,
Thought she’d won the million dollar love lottery,
Like all her other easy wins in her charmed existence.
He turned out to be cheating, opportunistic gigolo,
Scammed her out of loads of money and her true love.
When she grew older and her looks waned,
She turned her attention to the poor and the needy
Used her fortunes to ease their suffering and their needs
And lived a more abundant, fulfilling life.
And found a husband as rich as her,
And he loved and appreciated her for the rest of his life.

Bob Boyd

You come with all the praises
You know how to interest me
But are they empty words
To lure a vulnerable man
Into dark corners of your soul
Or are you angelic as you appear
And will I be as nice as you want
Or will we be chaotic together
And wish we’d never met

Bob Boyd

I hear the screeching of the tires,
The shattering of the glass,
The crunching of the steel
The clanging, the ripping of, the metal,
The scream and the silence,
The quiet stillness in the aftermath.
Then the sirens blare,
And the police arrive
Followed by the paramedics.
I wake up from the dream,
My mind and body shaking
Wondering if it is a premonition.
I pass it off, just a nightmare,
And forget about it after that.
A week later my future wife
Dies in a fatal car accident.
And I die inside every day.
And I hope to hell I never have
Another dream like that again.

Bob Boyd

My girlfriend and I were going to become the next big thing.
She said we were the best duet ever singing our ballads.
We were engaged to be married, our lives were great.
When we sang at functions, bars and local hotels,
Everybody who heard us loved our songs.
My girlfriend always said we were going to make it
And have a number one hit on Billboard and abroad.
We got our big break when an agent approached us.

But things didn’t go as she and I expected them to.
The agent just wanted my girlfriend and said
I wasn’t good enough to get her on the charts.
My girlfriend told me it was both of us or none,
But changed her mind when she saw the contract.
Now I sing solo at holiday inns and cheap bars
While my ex is a big star and has no use for me.

Bob Boyd

The aliens came through my bedroom wall.
They scared the bejesus out of me!
Little greys seized me, hypnotized me,
and levitated me to their UFO in the sky
When the head grey alien saw me,
he grimaced and measured me.
I saw the look of disappointment
in his big black almond-shaped eyes.
He frowned at the little greys and spoke
some kind of weird alien gibberish,
and his little grey minions sent me home
like an undesirable, undersized fish.
Frankly I was grateful to not make the cut.
My cow Bessie did, and she is in the field
of my dairy farm behind my house
Surgically sliced, diced, and bloodless.

Bob Boyd

My beloved dog Bo hated my new girlfriend Lillian.
Too enamored, too blown away by her beautiful looks,
I didn’t listen to Bo’s whines, barks and growls.
Lillian hated Bo. She knew he saw the real her.
One day Bo lay dead next to his food bowl,
most of his food uneaten in the bowl.
I knew what had happened to poor Bo.
I knew what I had to do about it.
Three days later, Lillian went missing.
Not even the police dogs could find her.
Only me, pig farmer Johnny Wales, and
his pigs know what happened to her.

Bob Boyd

She said she astral traveled to Jupiter and Mars.
I said, isn’t it risky to leave your body like that.
No way, she said. I’ve been doing this for years.
She said tonight I’m going to travel to Neptune.
I wondered if she’d get lost traveling so far.
Next day her body was unoccupied, and I didn’t
Know what to do. She had a pulse, but barely.
A month passed and she still had a weak pulse,

I was worried, knowing she had gotten lost.
Her doctor declared she was comatose.
I knew that was untrue. I knew she got lost
Somewhere in the vastness of the astral plane.
A year went by, still no sign of her, she expired.
At the wake, she sat up in the coffin smiling
Alive and back from her trip to Neptune.

Bob Boyd

Molly Molly Molly
Wake up to this glorious day
With your radiant blue eyes
Your sweet crimson lips
Your cascading brown hair

You fill my heart with ecstasy
With a single loving look
From those radiant blue eyes
And a sweet lingering kiss
From those crimson lips
And let me caress your
Cascading brown hair
Molly Molly Molly
None are so fair

Bob Boyd

When I drank my morning coffee my wife had made for me,
I got sick, drowsy, confused and suspicious of my wife.
We’d been having trouble in our seventeen years of marriage.
She winked, smiled, laughed gleefully, showed me a bottle.
I stumbled to her and grabbed the bottle which read thallium.
I fell on the kitchen floor on my back and knew I was dying.
My wife winked and smiled with my life insurance in hand,

And I died an agonizing death there on the kitchen floor.
My wife got criminally rich on my generous life insurance.
After I’d died, I hung around a while as a ghost appearing
In dreams to the investigators telling them my wife had
Poisoned me with the barely detectable poison, thallium.
They dug up my corpse and checked it closer for thallium,
And today my wife is rotting in prison with a life sentence.

Bob Boyd