Month: January 2025

You can keep your celebratory status.
Like anything else in life, it has its costs.
The price for all that attention
is the loss of your public freedom
and being bothered by paparazzi
and often reporters everywhere you go
and the risk of being quoted or
misquoted on something you said.
Screw all that attention, say I.
It just isn’t worth it to me in the end.
Although some celebs seem
to handle it incredibly well.

Bob Boyd

Supposedly an ant just dies
and has no heaven or
nirvana.

Where privileged humans
get the perks of living
cushy, eternal lives.

I find that discriminatory
to the little four-leggeds,
who according to research
have more group smarts
than humans.

But maybe their salvation
is eventually assured
through the transmigration
of souls from one life to
another.

In other words, today an ant
tomorrow a dog. Lives later
a privileged human on the
track of a nirvana or a
heaven.

But still … why the wait?
Why can’t ants be on the
fast track to eternal bliss
instead of having to
make their bones life
after life.

That is, If the Hindu
take on the scheme
of things is unerringly
and theologically right.

Bob Boyd

She told him she loved him.
He said he loved her too.
Marriage and nuptial bliss
followed.

All was good for three years.
Then the love and the bliss
began to unexpectedly
wan and wither away.

And like so many other loves
the once soulmates
ended the love and the bliss
hatefully in a divorce court.

Bob Boyd

Once upon a time monks allowed women
to visit Mount Athos.

But the monks became too distracted
as non-monkish men would as well.

I can understand this as an old, womanless recluse:
Women distract me too.

But not as much as they must have havoced
the minds and the holy intentions of celibate monks.

Though sometimes when I venture of of my quasi monastic solitude
and see women in grocery and department stores

I find myself faced with the distractions of all the lovely women
blooming in the aisles and at the checkout counters

I begin remembering when I was young and with women
and how wonderful and magical my world was then.

For awhile, I pine over being without one of those beautiful distractions
and briefly wish I had one now despite being old and living like a monk.

Bob Boyd

People have never been able
to get along for long
nationally or globally.

Wars keep happening.
Some countries can’t coexist in peace
Crimes still surge. Hate still rages.

Jails are still filled to capacity
with every imaginable kind of offender.
Murders happen everywhere everyday.

What a sad statement to the progress
and the evolution of the human race
that may be racing to its dissolution.

It’s like a delinquent, troublesome schoolkid
who sheepishly comes home
with all F’s on his shameful report card.

Bob Boyd

He visited the town he grew up in.
He knew nobody there.
Everything had changed
all the old stores were gone
The places had been rearranged.
All the people he knew had died
or move somewhere far away.
They’d been replaced with
many people he never knew
that overpopulated his town
and turned it into a crime-ridden
noisy and traffic congested city.
It brought clearly home to him
the realization that nothing lasts.

Bob Boyd

He met her on a dating app online,
a mysterious, exotic beauty,
who lived deep in the everglades in Florida.
She claimed to know the gators there by name
Alphie, Wanda and Clem.
He thought that was impressive, if true.
He drove down Alligator Alley to her
rustic cabin hidden in the everglades.
She was more beautiful in person
than her photos could ever have captured.
He stayed for the night and they got in a fight
He stomped outside to drive away
It was so swampy and dark he could hardly see
and curiously his car doors wouldn’t open.
He heard her call Alphie, Wanda and Clem
in an eerie and strange singsong voice.
He turned around and shuddered and screamed
and the snapping jaws of Alphie, Wanda and Clem
were the last things he ever saw in this world.

Bob Boyd

It amazes me how some people
seem to be born more mature than others
and wise beyond their young years
even when they are still children
And they know exactly what they want to be
that they achieve when they grow older,
the kid that says he or she wants to be a doctor
and achieves that goal in his or her life
is one of many amazing examples.
I lacked their wisdom and their direction
was misdirected and a late bloomer
didn’t find my way until age fifty.
And wish I could have been like them.

Bob Boyd

He remembered when she was young
and beautiful forever,
the most beautiful woman
he’d ever seen.

He recalled when he got up the nerve
to finally ask her out on a date
and feared because she was so beautiful
she’d turn him down or wonder
what made him think he was worthy of her.

As expected, she turned him down
and crushed his dreams of being with her
and treating her as well as he could.

Things got worse when she accepted a date
from a guy he knew was no good
and treated women like shit.

Years later when she’d been through
six bad boy guys and was old,
no longer beautiful and alone,
and her beauty no longer
clouded his rational mind,
he realized he was always
too nice a guy instead of
the bad boys she preferred,
and he knew a relationship with her
would never have worked out.

Bob Boyd

Looking out my apartment window,
I see most of the tree leaves
have turned a crinkly brown,
died and been blown off the trees.

But some leaves refused to surrender
to the cold winter purges
and remain a lively green on the trees
like resistant rebels of nature.

I ponder these leaves clinging to life
and wonder how they survived
the winter purges that killed so many.

I think maybe the trees they lived on
aided them in their survival
somehow protecting them from
the yearly seasonal slaughter
of all the fallen dead leaves.

Bob Boyd

He was a stellar student in high school.
He had a bright future,
a rising star, everyone said.
He became the Class Valedictorian,
straight A’s all the way.

He went to a prestigious university,
aced all his studies in his
freshman and sophomore years.

But became radicalized
in his junior year and joined
an anti-American left wing group.

Tried to bomb a police station,
got caught and shot and
mortally wounded.

Died in the ambulance
on the way to the ER,
a rising star burned out
and dead
in the dark night
of his misguided,
radicalized life.

Bob Boyd

At first their marriage was
like something out of
a fairy tale.

Until she got bored
a few years later
and began to spend
more time with her
girlfriends then him.

And he began to get
loney and disillusioned
and started going out
with his friends more
and out of sorrow,
loneliness and
drunkenness
he cheated on her.

The marriage fell apart
and he left her.

Surprisingly she wanted
him back again.
But it was too late.
For he knew she
would change for awhile
but go back to her
same old behaviors,
and he was done
with that forever.

Bob Boyd

He never suffered fools
He had no time
or patience
for whiners and
obstructors.

He wasn’t a feeder
of trolls or
an accommodator
of foolish nonsense.

He shut it all down
instead of entertaining it
with a Zen indifference
to all the whining and
the nonsense of all
those people
who just got in the way
of making the world better.

Bob Boyd

Many have prophesied the end
of the world.
Whether the would be soothsayers
were deluded or a liars,
The results have always been the same.

The sun still rises in the morning sky.
The moon still comes out at night.
The stars still grace the dark nights.
The world and other planets still spin.

So far, millions of years later,
the only predictable thing that keeps ending
is the lives of the false prophets
that keep predicting the end of the world.

Bob Boyd

He was fire sent
born in fury
born to cause trouble

He fulfilled his destiny
started chaos
all over the known world

Millions and millions
died in the flames of his fury

and none knew who he was
or that he was fire sent

Bob Boyd

He claimed to know
the secrets of God’s Realm,
but never told them to me

Said he attained the
highest level of gnosis
which was a mystery to me

He said he’d become
God in flesh,
which I didn’t believe

Sad though it was
I wasn’t surprised when
he got put into a psychiatric hospital
and never got out

Bob Boyd

The world has been full of wars,
a history of battles and slaughters,
which makes me wonder why
the human race seems to have
a predilection for wholesale
violence and hostilities.

Even some of the religious
washed their unholy hands
in the bleeding blood of
many women and men
during the witch hunts
and the inquisitions.

Even in the present,
wars still proliferate.
And the world always
seems on the brink of
another war somewhere
on the ever troubled planet.

One would think with all
the years humans have
existed, we’d be beyond
the wholesale violence
and unending hostilities.

Maybe one day a new day
will dawn and the yearned
for peace upon the planet
will finally arrive, and humans
can finally put down the swords,
the guns, and the nukes
and turn them all metaphorically
into the Biblical plowshares.

Bob Boyd

Many have prophesied the end
of the world.
Whether the would be soothsayers
were deluded or liars,
The results have always been the same.

The sun still rises in the morning sky.
The moon still comes out at night.
The stars still grace the dark nights.
The world and other planets still spin.

So far, millions of years later,
the only predictable thing that keeps ending
is the lives of the false prophets
that keep predicting the end of the world.

Bob Boyd

Norman loved his dog
more than a wife.
In five years
his first wife
left him for another,
and he left a nagging
second wife.
But he and his dog
remained together.
A better friend
he never had
he alway said.
So when two
teenage delinquents
shot his dog to death,
Norman took it
as personal as if
the delinquents shot
a human friend.
Norman went nuts
bought a shotgun
hunted the teens down
and shot them
both to death.
Now he sits in jail
and says he
doesn’t regret
his revengeful kills
that he did
for the love of a dog.

Bob Boyd

Her husband died twenty years ago.
She’s never gotten over her grief.
She is seventy now and alone.
They never had any children.
She believes his spirit is with her
and watches over in the afterlife.
She has imaginary conversations
with him in her mind everyday.
Some people might think
the loss made her delusional,
but I think she’s probably right
in believing her husband still
watches over her and hears
everything she says to him.

Bob Boyd