Category: Poems

He’s in his late seventies and still wears his freak flag,
long hippy hair, and he’s lucky he still has it.

He still listens to Hendricks, Iron Butterfly and other
great bands of the sixties and seventies.

Photos of Meher Baba, Ram Das, and other spiritual
notables of the New Age grace his apartment walls.

He disdains all the sellouts who left the movement
and went to work for the Man,

like his ex hippy girlfriend violet did when she left
him in a commune in 77,

like the leader and the members of the commune
who gave up on the dream.

But he still has great memories of the Age of Aquarius
and how lucky he was to have been a part of it.

And that gets him by, and he hopes when he dies
the afterlife will be a rebirth of those glorious days.

Bob Boyd

the annoying people
the jerks you knew
the bad experiences
in your life
the wrong people
you were involved with
the mistakes you made
that you wish you hadn’t
the medical problems
you may have had
or could have had
if you lived much longer
the different paths in life
you may have wished
you had taken
the end of pain
the end of sorrow
the end of suffering
and maybe the
beginning of
unconditional love.

Bob Boyd

I’m re-reading Bukowski. I like
how he doesn’t fill his poems
with too many flowery words,
and he usually writes with
what was once called plain
English that is so pleasing to
read, though I can appreciate
that often the flowery words
skillfully applied are high art.
Getting back to Bukowski, I
can see how some people
could see his poems as crude.
And his lifestyle wouldn’t have
worked for me, but damn! he
was one hell of a poet.

Bob Boyd

When he died, she was beatific,
his beautiful gold digger girlfriend,
and she was dreaming about
all the money she’d get in his will.
Hovering above his body, he read
those thoughts in her head. And he
knew he wasn’t entirely dead, and
when he came back to life and was
discharged from the hospital, he
left her and cut her out of his will.

Bob Boyd

In the tenth grade all the guys wanted to be with
her. I did too.

But she walked around with a snooty look on her face
all the time that telegraphed she was too good for us.

I was almost believing it. I was almost believing she was
too good and too beautiful for us.

But when she reached the twelfth grade and put on a lot
of weight, the magic was gone and none of us wanted her.

And she no longer walked around with that snooty look
on her face.

Bob Boyd

I’m back in my wild days
drunk out of my mind at
a club. A friend thinking
he’s helping me calls
my ex-wife, a bad idea.
Because she still loved
me, she came to the club,
but drunk as I was and
pissed about how she
treated me when we
were married, she saw
that it was best for her
to get the hell out of the
club instead of putting
her nose in my drunken
business. After she left,
I told my friend an enemy
could not have done me
a more grievous injury,
though I knew he felt
he was just helping me.
And I can still remember
how my wife saw the look
of disbelief in my eyes
when she showed up at
that club. In retrospect,
I kind of wish we could
have kept the marriage
together, since she loved
me that much despite her
always being out of the
house with female friends
when we were married,
and I was lonely together.

Bob Boyd

She came from a family of lawyers, but she
wanted to help people for a living as a social worker.

At age 15 when her parents asked her what she
wanted for her birthday

she said nothing for myself, but I’d like you to buy
gifts for the kids who live in the poorest part of town.

So on each of her birthdays thereafter, her parents bought
gifts for those kids in the poorest part of her town.

At age 21 when she was studying in college to be
a social worker, four men stole her car with her in it.

They drove her to a secluded area, raped her and
murdered her.

If there’s a loving God, where was that God for this young
woman who was compassion personified,

and why did such a sweet soul have to die being
raped and murdered to death?

Pisses me off. And I pray with all my heart that when
she died that horrible death that she went to a place so

blissful, so peaceful, that the way she died didn’t matter
and wasn’t even a memory.

Bob Boyd

He rocks back and forth in his old
wooden rocking chair,

thinking about his years navigating
the high seas

when he was a captain of a cruise
ship and saw many countries

and met thousands of people, one
of them his deceased wife who died

at age seventy-seven of the Covid
virus that almost killed him too.

He misses his wife everyday and
wishes the virus killed him too.

Now he just rocks back and forth
in his old wooden rocking chair

and prays to God to take him to
heaven to be with his wife.

Bob Boyd

The day is tried, the night is weary
old age drained them of their vitality
and they’re slowly dying
the sun is burning out
the moon has evaporated
the clouds have left the sky
the wind has lost its steam
the rain is too weak to pour
the earth is parched
the world is dry
there are no birds to sing
and no humans to cry
everything has died

Bob Boyd

A tiger fell over a 15 foot cliff into a crocodile
infested river.

He tried to climb back up the cliff, but each time
the cliff, made of dirt or clay, crumbled,

and he fell back into the river and tried
running in the shallow part of the river

to find a part of the cliff he could climb
to the top of the cliff on,

but he couldn’t get a grip on the cliff
and, tired, dropped back

into the river and into the jaws of the
hungry crocodiles that devoured the poor tiger.

Bob Boyd