Category: Poetry

it amazes me that
a notable American poet
achieved poetic fame
in American and abroad
writing many great poems
while often intoxicated
and kept writing them
through years of getting drunk
and surviving rocky relationships
he should have been given
some kind of esteemed medal
for his undeterred persistence
to his celebrated poetic art
despite all that drinking
and all that drunkenness
hail to his unfailing tenacity
hail to his great success

bob boyd

sweet lovable you
caring and sharing
your unfailing, real love
none could ever equal your caring
none could ever match your devotion
none have ever loved me as much as you
never thought a mongrel dog would love me more
than any of the women who came in and out of my life

bob boyd

Cicadas singing enchanting love songs
They sing them every night in moonlight.
To some humans it’s just an annoying ruckus.
To female cicadas it’s a sweet serenade
analogous to an infatuated human woman
listening to a smooth male crooner.
Amazing how this magnetic mating ritual
is so ingrained in human and insect life
and the lives of all species in this world.
It makes me wonder if all this mating
is only about propagating the species
and has nothing to do with romance and love.

Bob Boyd

Brenda and Randall dated for six years before they married.
They didn’t want to rush into marriage
before they were 100% sure it would last for the rest of their lives.

Nancy and Nate fell in love on the first date
and got married a week later,
foolish, impractical romantics that they were.

Branda and Randall got divorced two years after they married.
Nancy and Nate stayed mated for life.

Sometimes all the waiting,
sometimes all the planning,
doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.

Bob Boyd

Beautiful Woman

A beautiful woman
seems to have a perfect life.

But too beautiful for many men
to have the nerve to approach her.

Some men just want her like a trophy
and never appreciate her for who she is.

Other men get insanely jealous with her
because of all the glances she gets from other men.

And like women with regular looks,
she has her problems too.

Sometimes more than other woman,
her beauty a blessing and a curse.

Somehow beautiful and not beautiful seems
to equal out sooner or later in this temporary life.

Bob Boyd

Dark night
twisted shadows
pursue him
in his twisted
dreams.
He wakes up
in his twisted
live,
and is on
the prowl
again.
Another twisted
day
another twisted
kill
12 women so
far
all dead.

Bob Boyd

He regretted all the mistakes
he made in his life.
It wasn’t that he found religion
and felt sinful as hell.
It’s just that he wished he
could he do a rewind
and get a second chance
to do things better
with a more mature mind.
He could have done
so much better with
a second chance as a 2.0.
But life doesn’t hand out
second chances after
you’ve had your first chance
and make all your mistakes.
If we get a rewind with
reincarnation, maybe
that’s where you get
the second chances and
come back better and better
with each improved life.

Bob Boyd

If you are good with crowds of people,
of swarms of homo sapiens you have
to dodge and find your way around,
as if you were at a sporting event
trying to keep from being slammed into
by an oblivious person
or a random shopping cart,
then you’re better than me.

I assiduously try to avoid crowds
and dodging wandering people.
I go shopping later at night when
the swarms roll off to their homes
in their human-driven machines.

And I avoid events where humans
are as thick and as crowded
as sand in arid deserts
or on the shores of vast seas.

It’s not that I have Enochlophobia.
It’s just that I can’t stand
being cramped in spaces
with herds of my kind.
And what a relief it is
when I go shopping late at night
and the ubiquitous crowds
are finally dispersed.

Bob Boyd

Wickedness, wickedness, why so much in this old world.
I’m surprised the world doesn’t fall apart from it all
and float into space in pieces with the good and the wicked
screaming and dying and glued to it by gravity.
How the world keeps it together hosting so much evil
is a lifelong mystery to me.
Maybe the fact that daily many wicked people die,
balances the good and the evil out so much
that it eases earth’s burden of having to host so much evil.

Bob Boyd

They called him the son of Satan
and god almighty he seemed like it.
He had the face of an alter boy
or a wholesome boy next door.
That’s what sixty women thought that
he caught in his net of torture and death.
He did unspeakably abominable things
to all those women for days and hours
before slowly slicing them all to death.

He got sentenced to many lifetimes
in prison when he should have
been given a death sentence.
An avenging prisoner, the brother
of one of the woman he savaged,
gave him the death sentence he
deserved by stabbing him to death
sixty times with a handmade shiv.

Bob Boyd

It’s hard to imagine
how there were the Thuggee
in India who strangled people to death
seemingly without any guilt,
supposedly for the goddess Kali.

They are thought to have killed
up to 30,000 people,
strangling them all to death
and stealing their money and goods.

I supposed they covered up any guilt
with the excuse they were killing people
as offerings to their imagined god
instead of purely for murder
and for theft.

Bob Boyd

Cheerful, happy people
they had what he wanted
the peace and the joy
he was missing
in his unfulling life.

His girlfriend had left him.
his life seemed to lack purpose.
He wanted what those people had.

They said their leader was God,
and he seemed like he might be
with his charisma and his holiness
And dressed in a robe like a holy man.

Six months after he joined them
he saw they were only a cult
following a charlatan in a robe.
He left them and met a new girlfriend
and found more peace and joy in her
than he ever did in the cult.

Bob Boyd

He saw a thunderbird gliding
in a circle in the blue, summer sky
about a hundred feet above his head.
He wasn’t on drugs or imagining it.
He felt like he’d been blessed
to see a supposedly mythical bird.
He knew few people would believe him
if he told them what he saw.
Then the thunderbird flapped its wings
and thunder boomed in the sky
before it vanished into a portal.

Bob Boyd

He jogged and jogged and jogged
on sidewalks in many cities
on hot days and cold days
in summers and winters.

He ran fast and he ran slow
and he always ran alone.

Sometimes people yelled at him.
Sometimes dogs chased him.
But they didn’t deter him;
He kept jogging every day.

But the sneaky sidewalks
ended his jogging days
with a knee injury
that even an operation
didn’t properly heal.

So he became a walker
and never got injured again.

Bob Boyd

While she was crazily unhinged
over his political choices,
she told him he was nuts
despite her acting that way.

She thought she knew it all
about the political scene,
even though her frame of
reference was a biased
fake news TV show.

Her low info political tantrum
drove him away, and though
he was politically stupid
compared to her astute
political knowledge from
the one fake news show,
she cried all day when
he was gone and wondered
how he was unable to see how
brainwashed and dimwitted
he had become politically
by watching stupid alternative
news shows on the Internet.

Bob Boyd

He read there were microplastics in honey
and maybe in everything else.

Supposedly those microplastics could cause cancer.
He thought to himself what can’t cause cancer nowadays.

It’s supposedly in goddamn everything you breath in or eat,
and one day it’s not in some of those things

like how eggs are dangerous to eat one day
and healthy as hell to eat the next day,

like how chocolate is good for you heart one day
and contaminated with lead and cadmium the next day.

He gulped down two spoons of store bought honey
he had stirred into his instant coffee

savored two delicious pieces of Hershey chocolate
and thought screw it, we’re all going to die.

Bob Boyd

It grew colder and colder in her apartment.
She had on many layers of clothing.
Her heat had gotten too expensive.
She was afraid of the high cost of getting warm
and didn’t turn on the heat in her apartment.
She wondered if she could endure the freezing cold
as she began to shiver some more.
Her government had cut off the heat benefit,
which helped her to barely afford the cost of heat.
She had only a pauper’s pension,
barely enough to survive,
and the cost of heat was no longer affordable.
Her breathing became shallow;
she could feel the cold in her bones.
She began feeling drowsy even
though she didn’t think she was tired.
Her teeth chattered and she became disoriented
and took off all her clothes and succumbed to the cold,
leaving the world naked and frozen to death.

Bob Boyd

She was described as an oversexed, trashy person
who thought she was the belle of the ball.

She was said to have a deep black hole inside her
and a deceptive heart and a demonic soul.

She was skilled in the spidery dark arts of marrying for love
and killing for profit.

Her siren like looks and charms seduced and netted monied men
The seven she married in seven states had big insurance policies.

Six of them ended up dead and she got obscenely rich, but when
she failed at killing number seven in Texas, he shot her in the head.

Bob Boyd

The grass shivered.
The rocks quietly coughed.
The trees shook off the offending snowflakes.
The insects hunkered down.
A bird flitted about on a telephone wire
when the snow settled down.
I don’t know where the other birds went.
Nary a squirrel or a chipmunk was seen,
but a few rabbits frolicked in the snow.
As for me, I stayed inside watching movies
and drinking coffee and hot chocolate.

Bob Boyd

Even though he didn’t know what
imamorate meant,
he had one.

It lasted for seven unlucky years
with her and him
driving each other crazy
until his inamorata left him
and he became her
persona non grata.

Bob Boyd