Category: Poetry

I had a country girlfriend in NC, and she kind of
introduced C&W music to me.

Though I didn’t like it before her, I did appreciate
the stories in some of the songs and liked a few of
them, like one about not skating in a buffalo herd,
sound advice.

After that girlfriend who stole money from me and
was writing love letters to a married man while
with me and done me wrong.

The relationship kind of ended like a C&W song,
except I didn’t drink and couldn’t cry in my beer,
and I didn’t sing about her cheating heart.

But I did like Country Music after that, and really
appreciated how well written some of the lyrics are,
and my mama never raised me up to be a cowboy.

Bob Boyd

I don’t know why, but that part of a song lyric, Ex’s in Texas always sounded good to me.

I’ve been to Texas, San Antonio, Amarillo, and Dallas.
I liked Dallas the best. Maybe because I wasn’t in the
Air Force there like in the other two cities.

I was in my thirties in Dallas, and I remember that the
drivers drove like cowboys there, and it took me a while
to get used to it, but I liked that fast pace driving when I did.

I really liked Dallas. It seemed to have everything one would want. I remember when I was there hearing on the news about high school suicides in Plano, Texas. I just googled it, and it was in 1983. Sad sometimes young people take their lives when they’ve just begun to live.

I never had any ex’s in Texas. Not even a girlfriend there, but forget about San Antonio and Amarillo, military bases with basically no women on them then, and San Antonio was a basic training stint. Amarillo wasn’t much different, and the townies hated us there anyway.

Once a young guy in a car with his girlfriend stopped next to me on a street in downtown Amarillo, and his girlfriend had her dress intentionally pulled high up exposing her alluring legs.

The guy asked me if I wanted to go for a ride hoping his girlfriend’s nice legs would lure me into his car thinking that maybe I’d get lucky, and he could drive me to where his buddies were waiting to beat the shit out of me.

But although his girlfriend’s legs were appealing, and she had a pretty face, I wasn’t dumb enough to take the bait, and what kind of POS guy would use his girlfriend like that and what kind of POS girlfriend would be a part of that. But I have to admit, she did have nice legs.

And townies in Amarillo were known for trying to beat up military guys, and didn’t like that their city was a military one.

I wasn’t in Dallas long enough to really establish any relationships with any women that might have been girlfriends or wives, and I didn’t go to bars, so I had zero luck of having any Ex’s in Texas, but I always liked the song.

Bob Boyd

Spring is supposed to be here
but 42° seems a bit NC wintry to me.
It’s been this cold for over a week.
C’mon weather, give me a break.
Give me some warm relief, and
do what you’re supposed to do.
Instead of showering me with
April showers, showering me
with some warm weather, at
least 68°, but I’d probably
settle for 60°. Show me some
love and bring on the heat.

Bob Boyd

In 1982 Russian sailors taking diving training in Baikal Lake, Siberia took a dive of 164 feet, and 3 humanoid creatures about 9 feet in height floated up toward them.

The creatures had silver silhouettes and transparent spheres on their heads shaped like open umbrellas.

The creatures and the Russian divers stared at each other until the creatures descended back into the depths.

The sailors surfaced and told their commander what had happened and were instructed to catch one of the humanoids so it could be examined.

Seven divers dived back into the lake with snares and wires to catch one of the humanoids with.

The humanoids rose from the murky depths when they saw the divers, and one of the divers tried to catch one.

The attempt failed, and the humanoids unleashed high powered sonar waves that tossed the Russian divers back up to the surface.

The divers, having surfaced too fast, developed decompression sickness, and three of them died from it.

As to whether the humanoids were aliens, no one knows, but if this account is true, I suspect they were.

Bob Boyd

Six fathers and one widow arrested on Ash Wednesday 1519 in Coventry, England.
The charge, teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English.

Learning and saying the Lord’s Prayer back then in any language other than Latin was illegal. The punishment was a fiery death on the stake.

The widow was set free, maybe because she was a widow with no husband to help raise her children.

But, when she was escorted home by a bishop, he found a document in her sleeve containing The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Articles of Faith, and she was arrested again and imprisoned.

The seven were condemned to death. They were tied to three stakes and burned until dead in a place called The Little Park April 4th, 1519:

Master Archer, Thomas Bond, Master Hawkins, Robert Hockett, Thomas Landial, Master Wigham, Mistress Smith.

Bob Boyd

You see her in a hotel room
You freak out
Your body freezes
Goose bumps rise
You’re filled with dread
But Amanda isn’t there
She’s not conscious
And she cannot interact
She’s just an imprint
A loop that
Plays a moment
Over and over
She died from
A dramatic event
And Amanda
Moved on
March of 1966

Bob Boyd

She said what about that poem you wrote about reading a bird’s mind?
I said, I’m a jester at times, kidding about things I don’t believe in.
But what about your spiritual experiences and the kundalini energy in you, she said?
I said, those aren’t psychic powers, just natural manifestations in one’s spiritual life.
She cited people with alleged psychic powers she’d read about.
I said don’t believe what you’ve read. They’ve all been debunked.
I’d like there to be an abundance of psychic powers … if
they could be used for the good of humankind and to better the world.
But I just don’t believe anyone has bona fide paranormal powers.

Bob Boyd

She started sensing
spirits in her house.
Sometimes following her.
Sometimes touching her.
She began seeing the spirits
and her plants started to die
until it was discovered she
was being poisoned by
a carbon dioxide leak in
her furnace that when
fixed the spirits ceased
and her plants came back
to life.

Bob Boyd

She was told she had terminal cancer, a year to live
and said the cancer treatments made her lustful.
She divorced her husband of ten years and spent her
final days sleeping with as many men as she could.
I never understood her thinking. Many would be
acting better in this life hoping for a better afterlife.
Perhaps she was an atheist and wanted to get in
as much sex and pleasure as she could before
she passed on into a bleak and empty nothingness.

Bob Boyd

She wasn’t born into the money and the advantages it offered.
Acquiring material things meant little to her.
She didn’t need expensive clothes and an exorbitant lifestyle.
With those things she wasn’t consumed.
She enjoyed simple things and simple pleasures.
She wasn’t obsessed with always seeking more money and possessions.
She disdained the extravagant life. She lived for her art and for love.
And though she never made much money with her art and died
an unknown artist, she had a better richer life than those
who were trapped on the treadmill of striving for money and material things.

Bob Boyd

The night was dark
the woods were
unnaturally quiet
I knew my love
was coming for me.

I wanted and
didn’t want this
night because of
the price I had
to pay.

I heard her howls
coming closer
and closer, and
my heart beat
faster and faster
as I began to
really think about
the cost and
could I go through
with it, the
sacrifice I’d have
to make.

But when I saw
her coming to
me out of the
darkness, all my
reservations melted
at the sight of her.

She howled at me
lovingly, and I
steadied my breath
pulled out my
pistol and shot
three silver
bullets into her
and almost shot
myself to death
afterwards feeling
like I couldn’t
live with what
I had done.

Though I wanted her,
though I needed her,
though I loved her,
I just couldn’t
let her go on
killing people,
especially
after that
10-year-old girl
she slaughtered.

I stood with my
pistol smoking,
tears falling,
and I knew I’d
have to turn
myself in
to the police
and confess
to killing
my wife and
spend the rest of
my life in prison
because nobody
would ever
believe my wife,
an esteemed doctor,
could in any way
be a mythical monster.

But then I decided
to tell the truth
and be thought
insane, so I could
be put in a hospital
for the insane
instead of the
insane conditions
of a prison.

Bob Boyd

Many go missing in National Parks. David Paulides, author of the Missing 411 books, when once asked about how many missing people in National Parks he investigates yearly, he replied:

“We probably research several hundred people per year.”

One moment someone is in sight, like hikers hiking in a line and the last person in the line goes missing and is never found. A child is within his parents sight, a moment later the child is gone forever.

Dogs won’t track some cases because of not picking up any scents or from fear of tracking for unknown reasons.

In some cases, only shoes of the missing person are found, and despite extensive searches, nothing else of that person or his or her clothes is found.

Many disappearances are near water, lakes, ponds, rivers, etc.

Some vanishings are in Granite Boulder Fields. David Paulides talks about many people disappearing in or around Granite Boulder Fields, particularly in Yosemite National Park.

Highly intelligent people like doctors seem to go missing more than others. People who are German appear to go missing more as well.

Some of the missing have been highly experienced hunters and trackers, that begs the question: Are paranormal sources involved when people that experienced vanish?

Paranormal Theories:

Aliens abducting people

If aliens are the reason, perhaps they are unseen because of having an ability to move in and out of dimensions at will or the ability to appear and disappear instantly.

Maybe unheard because of an ability to move with lightning speed before an abductee can scream or yell for help.

Maybe because of technology or powers that can stun a person, shutting down that person’s physical and mental abilities before the capture.

People vanishing in portals or being trapped in them by supernatural means.

I heard on a Coast to Coast broadcast that David Paulidies said some physicists believed in portals and that they could be used militarily to make a troop of enemy soldiers vanish.

Perhaps there are hotspots where people walk into unseen portals.

Maybe portals appear and disappear for unknown reasons, and it’s luck of the draw if a person walks into one or is captured by one.

Unknown Supernatural Entities

Supernatural entities unknown and untraceable leaving no clues or ever being seen.

Whatever the reasons for all these 411 missing people, no definitive explanations exist.

After everything I’ve read and listened to about these cases, right or wrong, tin hat or no tin hat, I’m beginning to lean toward the alien abduction theory.

Bob Boyd

He always fell in love too easily,
too soon, too fast, too hard.

He wondered if his rushing in
was the result of feeling unloved
by one parent as a child.

Or, if he was somehow deficient
in some other psychological way
with an inability to take his time.

Or if like the euphoria with alcohol
or drugs, he was addicted to
falling in love beyond sense,
beyond reasoning, his mind
blown with the ecstasy of it.

Maybe it was like that saying,
“The heart knows what it wants,”
and he could no more ignore
falling in love too soon
than the stars cannot ignore
shining in the sky, the planets
cannot ignore spinning.

And looking back maybe at times
the cost of falling in love too soon
was high, but he felt despite that
in the end it was all worth it.

And, oh, how he misses those long
gone days of falling in love too soon,
as he hears soft rock romantic songs
playing in the background of his
waning life, his remaining years.

Bob Boyd

I used to be an avid viewer of any and all martial arts contact competitions. I practically lived for watching those competitions with the resultant adrenaline rushes and the exciting moves and thrilling matches.

Mixed Martial Arts, Jiu Jitsu, Judo, Muay Thai, karate, kung fu, etc. I loved watching them all. I watched UFC matches for years. I watched European Kickboxing Competitions on TV when I lived in the Philippines and other fighting competitions I saw on TV there.

I particularly liked the amazing Muay Thai, possibly one of the greatest combat skills on the planet with Muay Thai fighters starting their training as children.

But in one UFC match I saw, a guy got hit so hard with a spinning back kick that the contact to his head sounded almost as loud as thunder, and he instantly dropped to the floor as if dead. The hush over the audience and the broadcasters and the coaches was as if they feared the fighter was dead too.

Miraculously, the fighter was alive, but with a blow that hard it made me wonder if he’d have brain damage or be an early candidate for dementia.

Then I read how many Muay Thai fighters got banged up badly from fighting since childhood with lifelong injuries.

And my zealous enthusiasm began to sour on contact sports that left participants with the possibility of lifelong injuries and/or mental impairments, like the boxing great, Muhammad Ali.

And I no longer could watch any contact sports after that.

Bob Boyd

People who have been clinically dead and come back to life, NDEers, those that had Near Death Experiences, say communication in the afterlife is telepathic, and you understand everyone regardless of the language they spoke while living.

One reason is there are no flesh and blood bodies and no voice boxes there to talk with or make sounds with.

People who allege they’ve been abducted by aliens and those, even military personnel, who claim they’ve had interactions with aliens say aliens communicate telepathically.

I’ve probed these matters so much, first as a skeptic, that I now believe some or many of these accounts are true.

And, with scientists saying there are an estimated 50 sextillion planets in the universe, to me it’s a given and logical that life has to exists elsewhere in the vastness of the cosmos.

I didn’t even know what sextillion meant. My numbers stopped at billions, and I found it hard to wrap my mind around a number like sextillion. I was never stellar at math, pun intended.

And, P.S. I believe if Bigfoot exists, he’s interdimensional, and some wiser heads than me believe that too. Others think there’s a UFO connection. Whether true or just a conspiracy theory, things like this fascinate me.

Bob Boyd

She’d been attacked by a werewolf when she stepped into our backyard one night to take some clothes off the clothesline.

I fired three silver bullets at the werewolf and missed. I had a cache of silver bullets I made because there’d been a werewolf sighting in the forest surrounding our country home.

The werewolf sped away before I could get more shots off. My wife survived the attack with only a small bite, but she and I knew that was enough.

We knew she was doomed to become a werewolf the next full moon night. And we had to figure out how to deal with it.

I hate to admit I felt like killing her to save her from her fate and to save others from her, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill my loving wife of ten years.

The following month right before the full moon appeared my wife and I had decided she would be locked in the escape-proof cellar.

The full moon rose. My wife howled and howled in the cellar, and her howls sounded as if they came out of hell.

A while later, I heard a crashing sound in the cellar and glass breaking. Then I heard two separate howls outside the house.

I peeked out my front window and saw a male and female werewolf running into the forest hand in hand. I grabbed my pistol loaded with silver bullets and went down to the cellar to check on my wife.

I saw the cellar window that was ten feet above the room had been broken from the outside, and my wife was gone. I knew then she had run off with the werewolf, the one that bit her, and I feared I’d never see my wife again.

It was as if the werewolf bite was like a love spell that bound him and my wife together.

I’d searched the forest every full moon night for years after that, my pistol loaded with silver bullets to kill the male werewolf who stole my wife and to try to save her from the darkness that had invaded her innocent soul.

But I never found him or my wife, as if they migrated to a faraway hunting ground. And I knew I’d lost my wife forever.

Bob Boyd

He saw the electronic speed sign flashing 30 miles an hour. An old man whose life had gotten abysmally boring, he became inspired.

He turned around in his 2020 Honda Accord and drove thirty yards back down the street. He turned around again, and pushed the gas pedal to the floor and sped past the sign at 50 miles an hour.

After that, he made it a practice to speed up whenever he saw an electronic speed sign. He got an exhilarating thrill out of beating the assigned speed limits, like when he listened to an old song he liked, I Can’t Drive Fifty Five.

Beating those speed limits made him feel like he did in his youth, a hippie and a rebel protesting the Vietnam war and sticking it to the Man with his freak flag flying, his unconventionally long, wild hair.

As he got the hang of driving faster on electronical sign monitored streets, he kept breaking his speed records, his personal best, a buck and a quarter.

Bob Boyd

Greensboro Park contains a Vortex, a hotbed of paranormal happenings. You name it, seen it, parades of cryptids passing through – Bigfoot, Wendigo, Spring-Heeled Jack, to name a few, usually in the dark, rare occasions in daylight.

Saw Spring-heeled Jack, a rainy day in May. With high-powered spring heels he sprang up a 30-foot-tall tree and laughed at me; that devil knew I couldn’t jump that high.

Did you know Bigfoot has a twin? Saw them both in Greensboro Park, Christmas Eve 2023. Could be mistaken, but I think they wanted to give me a surprise Christmas present beneath twinkling Christmas tree lights, but I ran away too scared by the size and frightening sight of the Bigfoot duo to hang around for a Christmas present or my death.

The Vortex has a dark side. For some tuition money, a student at UNC, Greensboro, Michelle Burns, sweet, beautiful sophomore, started cryptid tours in Greensboro Park for $20 a head. Tours didn’t feature real cryptids, members of her sorority dressed as cryptids, disrespectful fakes, an affront to the Vortex.

As I foresaw in a dream and warmed Michell about, but she wouldn’t listen, the Vortex took offense. During Michell’s final tour, the Vortex opened, the skies thundered, Michell screamed, the terrifying Vortex swallowed her, and she was never seen again.

Often on moonlit nights in Greensboro Park, like psychics coaxing dead people to go to the Light, I coax Michelle, who was my girlfriend, to come back to the park, and I beg the Vortex to forgive her and release her.

So far no luck; the vortex doesn’t forgive easily and will not be mocked.

Bob Boyd

Going on forty and lonely, she married a man who simply was available.

He wasn’t the prince charming she had always dreamed of, but he was financially stable and a kind and decent man.

As the years with him passed by, she felt she had settled, and her love for him had waned.

At times, she wondered if she divorced him, she’d have another chance of finding her prince charming.

But she feared being alone for the rest of her life, and she had gotten much older, her body and face less attractive.

So she remained unhappy in her lackluster marriage and found her prince charming vicariously by watching soap operas on TV.

Bob Boyd

When his high school girlfriend, Angela, who promised to marry him left him for another guy

he joined the military. saw action in Iraq, and four years later returned to his city a war-hardened man.

He looked for Angela, still in love with her, learned she had moved to another city and had gone missing mysteriously.

Years later a dream, he saw she had been murdered and he woke up crying.

A day later Angela’s body was found buried in a forest, her murderer, a serial killer arrested and jailed.

Now with tears in his eyes, he brings flowers to her grave and prays he’ll see her again in a dream and when he dies.

Bob Boyd