Day: April 24, 2026

To his neighbors
he was a kindly old man.

Always friendly, a good
person, a nice neighbor.

But when the police brought
him out of his house in handcuffs,

the neighbors were shocked to
learn he’d raped and murdered

a teenage girl when he was a
young man in an unsolved crime

that thanks to advancements in DNA,
he finally got apprehended for.

Bob Boyd

She’s young and beautiful.
feels she’ll be that way forever.
She’s caught in the illusion of eternal beauty,
trapped in a prison of self adoration,
until the years begin to cruelly erase her illusion,
and the men stop looking and calling,
and she’s no longer the prize they all
longed and sacrificed for.

Bob Boyd

We’re all hanging by tenuous threads in this
temporary existence

that we’re rarely aware of as other people
are dying every day.

Old age, accidents, sickness, murders, and
natural deaths.

Children, teenagers, young people, middle-aged,
and the old alike;

all hanging by those tenuous threads, and few
know when the threads will snap.

Bob Boyd