Category: Poetry

Imagine if reincarnation is real
Imagine if we come back to each life
like an actor playing different roles
a good person one life
a bad person the next
in another incarnation
a composite of the two
the different roles
each repeating life
to sort of balance and ready us
to be refined enough
to eventually achieve
to finally attain
a perfect eternal liberation
from this refinement of souls
this repeating life

Bob Boyd

Watching the Rasbora fish
in my ten gallon aquarium,
I’m seeing a microcosm of humanity:

Some of the Rasboras get along
and seem like friends.

Some dislike each other
and have occasional spats.

Some of them hate each other
and get into territorial wars.

Some of them seem to fall in love.
and mate and have fish kids.

Most of them just want to get along
and go swimmingly about their daily business.

Bob Boyd

I don’t care if she is a witch
My pulse reaches a frantic pitch
When She looks into my stunned eyes
And her love above all I prize.

I don’t care if she casts a spell
That could send us both to hell
For her love, I’d even go there
For her love, I’d go anywhere.

Bob Boyd

When I was a teenager, a Christian teenager
befriended me.

But his friendship was counterfeit.
He just wanted to convert me to his particular
brand of Christianity.

He said if you don’t go with Jesus,
you go to hell.

I wasn’t a deep thinker as a teenager.
I was superficial, rebellious and trouble.

But I must have had some good sense
and maybe a budding intellect.

I said to him, “What if natives on an island,
never saw a missionary or heard of Christ,
do they go to hell out of ignorance?”

Though I’m a Believer of sorts, minus
the dogma and a disbelief in hell,
and a contemplative rather than a
follower of rules I don’t agree with.

And I still don’t believe a loving God would
ever eternally damn anyone.
And I don’t believe the Lord of the Universe
is so limited that there’s only one way,
as many claim there is without even
a scintilla of concrete proof.

I believe as the Sufis believe: “There are
as many paths to God as humans have souls.”
That seems logical to me.

Bob Boyd

She was a veterinarian beloved by her clients,
taking care of their pets and animals needs,
a good citizen never involved in anything shady

She meets an unscrupulous, egotistical doctor,
a shyster who thinks he’s a Don Juan incarnate.
At first she sees through his obvious game
and blatant character defects … but,
for reasons oblivious to me,
she ignores her initial assessment
and falls in love with him.

Her involvement with him becomes the worst
mistake of her seemingly unblemished life.

He has an ex-girlfriend who’s taking him to court
for stalking and harassing her repeatedly.
She has an ex-husband who is taking her to court
for custody of their two children.

Somewhere in the mix of these two impending
court cases, Doctor Evil talks the veterinarian into
hiring a hitman to solve these two problems.

Get this. She freakin’ agrees to it.
Can you imagine?
What the hell was she thinking?
How could that evil SOB talk her into becoming
hellishly evil when she had always been
a good and caring citizen taking care of
and healing pets and animals?

They meet with the hitman, who as often is
the case, is an undercover cop.
They get arrested and get bailed.

Probably ashamed and wondering how
did she let herself get dragged down by that
evil SOB, she takes an elevator to the
top of a tall building and jumps off to her death.

I think to myself, if only she had stayed on
course with her initial assessment when the
red flags were flying all around her.
But sometimes love is stronger than
reason and many are those who make dire
or, at the least, foolish mistakes because of it.
This I know from experience.

Bob Boyd

I’ve seen it many times in true crime shows,
a man and a woman in love who plot to murder
the woman’s husband and go through with it,
and their bond is so unbreakable that they
are willing to kill and risk their freedom for it
until they get caught and the heat is on,
and they testify against each other with the
hope of getting lighter sentences.

Or, if miraculously lucky, one of them
succeeding at faking being an innocent
victim in the murder instead of a
co-conspirator and turning his or
her back on their homicidal act of
twisted and evil love with the
hope of avoiding a life sentence.

Usually these homicides are engineered
by the wife, who tells her paramour that
her husband his been physically abusive
to her or sexually abused their kids.
The duped male dumbed down by love
falls for the ploy and kills an innocent man
and gets jilted in court and goes to jail
for a murder and a counterfeit love.

I don’t know about you, but if I were with
a woman who suggested I kill her husband
for her despite whatever bait she dangled
in front of me, I’d bid that wicked woman
goodbye and be forever off the hook.

And were I a guy foolish enough to consider it,
I’d be thinking if she could have him killed,
I could be next, and I’d make damn sure
I didn’t have an insurance policy with
her as a beneficiary that would make me
worth far more ($$$$$$) dead than alive.

Bob Boyd

My friend Ben who I grew up
with in a city just outside Boston
had twenty pet mice
that he loved like some people
love their cats and dogs.

He jokingly call himself
Lord of the Mice
and I guess he kinda
was the Lord of his pet mice.

When he learned mice were
being experimented on in
a nearby lab
he seriously became
outraged.

He complained about the lab
all the time and called it the
Mouse Horror House.

He said it had pissed him
off so much he was
going to do something
about it.

I thought he was just
speaking out of anger
and wouldn’t do
anything about the
lab.

I mean what could he
really do?

But one night he
left his mice at
my door with a note
about finding them
a good home

before he broke into the lab
and freed all the mice
in the lab and blew it up.

He vanished after that
not wanting to go to jail,
and the cops never found
him and I never heard
from him or anything
about him

until I read in the news
about a lab being
blown up in Arkansas
and all the mice in it
set free.

I supposed in his mind
the Lord of the Mice
was still doing
the Lord’s work.

Bob Boyd

Stella, sixties star
soared in the skies
maybe too close
to the sun

all in hippie
dressed the part
flower prints, tie dyes
psychedelic colors
did LSD, meth and
other drugs too

A few bad trips
tired of freak outs
sought the Truth
In the spiritual oasis
mother India
found a guru
Shri Swami something

three years later
returned to Cali
enlightened
she claimed
looking crazier
more screwed up
then when on drugs

vegan thin to the bone
worryingly skeletal
then came the day
she claimed she had
siddhis (super powers)
I can fly she said

eyes lit like flashbulbs
sadhu dreads disheveled
kinda zombitized

a day later she flew
off a ten story building
and the Stella I loved
and will never forget
took her final trip
into the Great Unknown.

Bob Boyd

In a pet store, languished a sad, old Betta fish Jailed in a tiny plastic cup with a tight lid on it.

Depressed, he wondered how have I come to only this, a plastic cup-bound captive unhappy and imprisoned, probably for the rest of my life?

When he was a younger fish, he had grand, opulent dreams of living the high life in an upscale, ritzy fish tank with soothing bubbling water and aquarium lid lights like soft moonbeams glowing upon the water and providing the perfect ambience.

After years trapped in that cup, his hopes shattered, his life … his dreams … broken, he had resigned himself to a gulag-like ever after life.

Then a renowned Fish Whisper named Bob Boyd marched into the pet store and saw the anguishing Betta.

He listened to the Betta’s sad tale, and he deduced he didn’t have to be a Freudian psychologist to see the Betta was suffering and suicidal in his soul-crushing, plastic prison.

Having no money or credit cards on him, he’d forgotten to bring his wallet, he needed a plan pronto as the Betta began to hold his breath to self-smother himself to death.

Bob said to himself, Screw my ethics!, grabbed the plastic cup, stuffed it under his surplus navy pea coat with the excited Betta pumping his fin in the water and gasping the word freedom!

To create a distraction, Bob knocked over a cricket bin with the crickets chirping and scrambling all over the pet store floor, the pet store workers going crazy, and he stealthily snuck out of the store.

And the Betta was imprisoned in that plastic cup nevermore.

Bob Boyd

A guy on my old school romantic songs YouTube playlist is singing about how he’d really love to see this woman tonight and my kinda monk like mind falls into an irresistible reverie memory about how when it’s good it’s immeasurably good and sweetly incomparable.

My mind and heart become so wildly discombobulated with romantic feelings that I’m so drenched and drowning in them that I don’t come up for air as I begin dreamily thinking I’d rather have continuous, unending, real moments like really loving to see the right woman tonight than to experience a thousand nirvanas. Nay, ten thousand, maybe even more.

And I remember how when I was a teenager lifting weights at the YMCA and a beautiful, blue-eyed blonde teenage walking talking dream came into my life and I became so madly, so incredibly, so mind blowingly in love with her that I could no longer pump the iron because the iron could never compare to her sweetness her softness, her hugs, her kisses, her teenage seeming forever love.

Then I remember how she cheated on me. My mind gets an SOS. I throw myself a life buoy and gasping for clear headed air and sensibility, I climb onto the boat of reality and put away those silly, sappy, discombobulated romantic feelings.

Bob Boyd

I’m watching a cam on a street in the Philippines
in Davao where I lived for four years

I see a young woman standing on a corner
all by herself at 2 am Philippines time

A mayday alarm goes off inside of me:
WATCH OUT, WATCH OUT. You’re not safe.

Then I remember this is the Philippines
where the woman is safe standing

on the street corner waiting for a 2 am bus
unlike in my country America where

she’d risk one of those it only happens to others
who become easy prey for being raped or killed

The bus arrives. The woman gets on, and another
young woman replaces her an hour later

with no fears, no concerns, and I’m the only one in
these street scenes conditioned to fear the worst.

Bob Boyd

no matter how beautiful you are
no matter how famous or rich
we all go to the grave
we all are forgotten
thousands of years from now
or at least longer
no one will know how beautiful,
famous or rich you were
no one will care
I call that perspective

bob boyd

Long ago, hundreds of deviant Anglo Saxons
buried there,

The potters field of Greensboro before
it became Greensboro Park.

Every kind of criminal you could think of
from thieves to serial killers were buried there.

The worst are the vampires haphazardly interred there
without stakes pounded into their hearts

who crawl out of their graves when the park
gets dark and nightmarishly creepy

and suck the blood out of unwary park visitors who
doubt the dangers of the preternatural park.

One almost got me over a year ago, at first a hot seductive woman until her fangs emerged and almost sank into my neck.

The horror haunts me still. I wake up with the shakes from terrifying, fang-toothed nightmares.

A vampire exterminator I created in my laboratory,
Vampire Off Spray saved me.

And not to get commercial, but I sell Vampire Off Spray, twenty bucks a bottle plus shipping fees (tax included).

Bob Boyd

On TV and in the Movies
Cowboys good and Indians bad
Indians villains and cowboys heroes
Real truth came out in the 60s
Indians good and cowboys bad
Native Americans slaughtered
Lands stolen and treaties broken
More Native Americans killed
More lands stolen, more treaties broken,
Native Americans exiled to reservations
More lands stolen by the real villains
Way of life stolen too, trails of tears
Real heroes, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse

Bob Boyd

I don’t believe in a Satan
But I see a satanic evil
In all those witch hunts
Of those shameful days
The tortures, the burnings
Evil’s unholy biddings
Church collusion
Mothers daughters
Sisters wives
Begging crying
Sobbing pleading
Cast into the fires
Tender women
Brutally treated
Murdered
By deceived
Heartless
Cruel men
Acting like
Hell’s demons
Wickedness
Worthy of
A devil’s praise

Bob Boyd

One became a PhD
The other an MD
The third never
Amounted to anything
According to her critical mother
An underachiever
A ne’er do well
Never went to college
Lacked the expected ambition
Required of the three sisters
In their high achievers family
Father a prominent lawyer
Mother a college professor
Sister number three just
Worked selling ladies shoes
In an upscale retail store
When the mother and father
Got old and became seriously ill
One and two, too busy with their careers
Number three was there for her parents
Their Caregiver twenty four hours a day
Until they both came to their final ends

Bob Boyd

Li Po and Du Fu I admire what you do
or I should write did.

Your poems are without peer
profound and so clear

It amazes me you wrote such
masterpieces of poetry way back
in the 8th century

If I could travel back in time
I’d like to be mentored by
both of you

maybe on
top of the Green Mountains

And maybe if we had
the time and the daring
between creating works
of poetry

in the literary
landscape of the Tang
dynasty

we could
go on a quest
for the dragon pearl.

Bob Boyd

The strawberry rasbora fish in my fish tank stay at the bottom.
They never come to the top for food, kind of annoys me.
I wanted to see them swimming merrily all over the tank.
But … one of them reminds me of me, the rebel one.
He breaks free from the herd, or should I write school?
He marches to that different beat. He drums his independence
from the restrictions of compliance with the other rasboras.
He swims all over the tank unconcerned about the opinions of
the other rasboras unrestricted by the status quo.
I think the repressed rasboras secretly admire his free spiritedness
but fear censure from the other fish, rasbora public disapproval.
I salute you free spirit rasbora, escapee from the conformity.

Bob Boyd

He was born in a Goldfish Breeder aquarium
On a hot summer day in August of 1922.
Not having the right pedigree he was fated
To be a feeder fish for bigger aquarium fish
Instead of a prized Goldy with the right genes.

Shipped to a pet store, luck came his way
A ten-year-old boy named Jimmy miraculously
Chose him out of hundreds of feeder fish
And gave him the name of Oscar.
Elated, Oscar couldn’t believe his luck.

He blew bubbles, ecstatic to be a pet.
Jimmy kept him in a 2 gallon fish bowl;
It wasn’t the Hilton but was better than
A final home in a bigger fish’s stomach.
But Jimmy didn’t take good care of him.

Oscar died three weeks later, but briefly.
While clinically dead, he left his body
And met angelic goldfish in white light
And saw a glorious goldfish lake and
Felt rapturous bliss all around him.

He didn’t want to return to his dull life
Imprisoned in that dingy, crowded bowl.
But he was told he had to go back
By a resplendent goldfish god emanating
Unconditional love and clothed in white light.

Because Jimmy hadn’t taken good care of him.
Jimmy’s father gave Oscar to a neighbor who
Had a pond full of goldfish that he fed everyday.
Oscar lived twenty happy years in that goldfish pond
Until the goldfish angels came for him in December 1942.

Bob Boyd

3/6/2025
I finish my workout
I feel so goddamn good
Resistances bands and dumbells
Prefer working out at home
My equipment
My time
I feel so goddamn good
It almost amazes me
That when many my age
Are in nursing homes or dead
I’m feeling so goddamn good
I ride my exercise bike
For two hours in front of my computer
I’m writing this poem as I ride
Into the light of another day
That brings me a day closer
To when I take my final ride
Into the great beyond

Bob Boyd