Category: Poems

I see the bees carrying pollen attached to both their hind legs,
like little yellow buckets.

I learn bees work 6 to 8 hours finding the pollen and flying
it to their hives with those pollen pellets stuck to their legs.

I wonder how they got the kind of endurance that enables
them to fly with those pellets weighing 30% of their weight

and fly the six to eight hours daily with those heavy loads,
perhaps they start as bee young’uns and carrying only

10% of their weight and gradually work up to the 30%. And
I wonder if they get paid for their work.

Maybe they get paid piecemeal (pollenmeal?), or a
good hourly rate with overtime after 6 hours.

I hope they don’t do all that labor-intensive work for free.

Bob Boyd

At first

you’re blown away

by her beauty

but in time

that blown away

feeling fades

and you

see beyond

the superficial

beyond

the beauty

three times

I experienced this

three times

I was

disappointed

after I saw

what was

deeper than

their beauty

what was

inside their

pretty heads

Bob Boyd

I was married to a woman named Ruth once,
looking back she was probably the nicest woman

I’d ever been with.

Except

she was an extrovert and I am mostly an introvert.

So

after she got a new job and met a lot of girlfriends,
she began spending more time with them than with me.

And

after being lonely together, eventually I left her,
and sadly decades later in her early fifties she died.

Now

I wonder if we meet in the afterlife would her having
been an extrovert and me an introvert on earth matter?

And would we have another go at love and would it
fare better in the afterlife than it did on earth?

Bob Boyd

In my waning years, a few, maybe many, sometimes I think I’d
like to have one last shot at finding true love.

For example, that one last shot with the soulmate I never
found in this life.

And, maybe, just maybe, if she or I died first, when
the one remaining died, we’d be together forever.

But then I think what if you fell in love with a woman
and she gave you no end of misery and trouble,

and you went out of this life disappointed and pissed off?
And I cease the idealized, wishful, foolish thinking.

Bob Boyd

I read mice build holes in houses near gaps in houses,
utility lines, pipes, etc. I imagine plans for the holes
are drawn up by engineer mice for the locations,
the desirability, and the accessibility.

I imagine construction mice, probably unionized,
do the actual building of the holes and homes inside
the holes.

I imagine interior designer mice finish the houses
with their special skills and flourishes.

And, last, I picture families of mice buying the
holed homes with whatever money or barter
mice use for commerce.

Bob Boyd

When you made the fatal mistake
to what love we had left

by telling me to use my fucking head

you didn’t know that aside from pissing me off
and getting a strong rebuke from me

your disrespectful words sounded the death knell
for our marriage already in peril

due to you letting your body go into
obscene obesity

and once you remarked that you would get in
shape for a new man if our marriage ended

probably as a warning that you could find
another

but you didn’t know that in my heart and mind
the marriage was over

and soon I’d find another and leave you for that
unforgivable use your fucking head affront.

Bob Boyd

He had weird psycho eyes that were
unblinking and disturbingly bright.

Yet a lot of fools followed him, believing
his insane claims they were all aliens

and needed to relocate to their real
home on some other faraway planet.

They drank the poison they called elixir
that they thought would take them there,

but instead of journeying to that world,
they landed in the world of the dead.

Bob Boyd

I have made a teddy bear world, and for me it’s like
a brief return to the innocence of childhood

that feels so pure and nice, and I wonder if that is
the same feeling I’ll feel in the afterlife.

Bob Boyd

I often wonder what we do in the afterlife.
Where do we live? Do we sleep, and do we
run into people we didn’t like or wouldn’t
want to meet in the afterlife?

My all consuming hope is that we don’t
see people we didn’t want to see in the
mysterious afterlife.

And I don’t believe that people who were
annoying, jerks, or just plain mean
become automatically nice in the afterlife.

But Mike McHugh, Joe Drew, already there,
I hope I see you. And at least one of the
women that I should have been with
but didn’t know she was interested in me
until it was too late.

And I think maybe spirits sleep on beds
and pillows made of the softest cumulus
clouds ever.

And maybe between sending blessings
to all those in the world, you bliss out
the rest of the times in surreal fields of
wonderment, peace and ineffable joy.

Bob Boyd

You and I were so long ago you’re barely a memory,
and though I lost respect for you decades ago

when you cheated on me with that college guy even
though you said you were going to marry me,

sometimes I wonder how your life went and it you’re still
alive in this world.

But then I regain my senses, and I see that we were
so long ago that how your life went does not matter to me.

Yet once in a great while, maybe decades a while, I do
wonder how your life went.

But I suspect if I were to know, I’d find out that I really
didn’t want to know after all.

Bob Boyd