Day: March 21, 2025

if I could write a hundred books about you,
none of those books could ever explain
all the wonders I see in you.

If I could count all the stars in the sky,
the total would not compare to all
the love I have for you.

And I know if I could be with a thousand women
none of them could compare to you.

Bob Boyd

I remember how bright the stars were
and how a comet streamed across the sky
right as we met under a summer’s night
at that folk music festival in Alban, Vermont
when the world seemed full of endless joy
and tears were uncried and nobody died.

I remember how dark the night was,
how none of the stars came out to shine,
how no comets streamed in the sky,
on that tragic moonless, empty night
when that chronic depression became too much
and you walked into Lake Champlain and died.

Bob Boyd

Mandy broke up with him before he went into the Army.
She said she was going to college and needed her space.
Though he never tried to talk Mandy out of leaving him,
in his heart he never broke up with her.

After he returned home from the Army four year later,
he learned that Mandy was back in town too.
A shady guy named Randall said she’d become a whore,
and he could see her downtown hooking on Park Ave.

He slammed Randal against a wall for his blatant lie
but heard from some of his old buddies that Randall was right.
He drove down to Park Ave and saw Mandy there on a corner looking like she was drugged out and not like herself.

A seedy guy in an old pickup truck stopped in front of her and Mandy got in the car and rode down an alley with him.
He followed and saw Mandy having sex with him in his truck.

Sickened, he almost threw up when he saw the god awful truth with disgust and sadness in his heart, he drove home.
He couldn’t sleep that night wondering what happened to his once innocent and sweet high school sweetheart.
He decided to go looking for her the next day
to try to rescue her from what she had done to herself.

He drove up and down Park Ave, but never found Mandy until he saw in the 6 pm news, that she had died of a drug overdose on Park Ave the night before.
Tears welled up in his eyes. He regretted not trying to
rescue Mandy the day before when he saw her on Park Ave.

He left town after that and reenlisted back in the Army
and volunteered to fight in the deserts of Afghanistan.
Distraught and endlessly thinking about Mandy,
he stood up and walked into enemy fire in a battle there,
committing suicide with the hope of joining her in death.

Bob Boyd

In June of 92 in upstate New York
on a verdant pasture framed with trees, a cow,
I’ll call Betsy, for lack of her real name, if any,
wandered toward me from behind a wired
fence and hung her head over it, looking at me
as if to say Hello.

Surprised, delighted, amazed I said something
I’ve forgotten to Betsy – not understanding human
speak, she didn’t respond linguistically.

But Betsy stared into my eyes as if
communicating telepathically but not quite.

However, the contact felt good, a contact high,
and I liked just staring at the cow and the cow
staring back at me, as if we had an Indescribable,
undefinable human to cow sympatico, as if we had
an interspecies unspoken communication.

Reluctantly, I had to leave Betsy, I was with friends
on our way to other places, but when I said goodbye
to her, I swear by the cow gods above, she
intoned a long mooooooo, as if a long goodbye,
as if we really had an Indescribable, undefinable
human to cow sympatico.

Bob Boyd