Poems by Bob Boyd

Waves of joy
streams of pleasure
your love washes
over me

Bob Boyd

My friend, Don, fed up with women,
chose a life size doll instead of a real woman
at an exorbitant cost of $3,000.

I said that’s a high price tag for a doll.
Don said, “It’s a bargain compared to how
much money I’ve blown on women.”

I let the conversation go at that,
but wondered if Don had lost his mind,
and, besides, I wondered what would
he and the doll he called Alma talk about?

I got the answer a week later when I
visited Don and Alma, and Don spoke to
her as if she was carrying on a conversation
with him.

A year later, Don got really crazy and said
Alma had died of cancer and he had buried
her in his backyard.

Two weeks later, Don showed up at my apartment
with a crazed look in his eyes.

“Alma’s haunting me!” he said.

I said, “Maybe you should see a shrink.”

Offended, Don stomped out of my apartment
and yelled he needed an exorcist and not a shrink.

Days later, worried about Don, I visited him at his
house and found him dead in his backyard with
a resurrected, dirt covered Alma on top of him.

The police said he died of a massive heart attack,
and joked about the doll, which I absconded with,
sprayed holy water on, and burned to ashes just in case.

Bob Boyd

In Louisiana where he lived, he drove around one night
like a madman in his old Honda trying to forget his ex

who despite being engaged to him and planning
on marrying him

left him for his friend who was going to be
his best man at their wedding.

He drove on highways and byways all over Louisiana,
but still couldn’t get her out of his mind.

The break up, the end of the engagement
and the marriage

were too big a heartache for him and
when the police raced after him for speeding

he lost control of his mind and became
even crazier and more reckless.

Miraculously, he escaped from the police,
and seemed to have vanished from this earth.

He was never found, but there’s a crying male ghost
that appears at the shores of Lake Pontchartrain,

and there might be an old Honda buried in
the water there.

Bob Boyd

A sinister little boy
dancing around
gravestones asks
visitors to stay and
play with him.

A woman in white
hovers above
the gravestones
but says nothing.

A man in dark
19th century
clothes named
Ephraim with dark
sockets in place
of eyes, said to
yell at women
and scare them
away.

What to make
of these ghosts
I cannot say.

But many claim
to have seen them.

And maybe these
spirits are real,
but the bigger
question is if
they are real,
why are they
still on earth
and not
elsewhere
in the afterlife?

Bob Boyd

Her beauty captivated him.
Never saw a woman as beautiful as her.

Her face and body perfect,
eyes heavenly blue.

But he failed to take the time to
know her beyond the superficial.

Fell in love with her immediately,
married her too soon.

Now he’s in a marriage from hell
with a woman impossible to live with

who is planning to ruin his reputation
and his life

when she tells all in court with some
lies thrown in and ruins him financially too.

Bob Boyd

Important in his day
a star among stars,
fame that would last
forever.

Hailed as the greatest
actor of all times. Never
any as famous as him.
Known all over the world
even in outer Mongolia.

Today nobody’s heard
of him, his fame washed
away in the tides of time.

Bob Boyd

It was as if evil had been implanted in him from birth,
and he never had a chance to be good.

Even his face had an evil look that only grew worse
as he became older.

When he was a child of six, he began kidnapped
dogs and cats in his neighborhood, torturing and killing them.

At age sixteen, he began his kills, and got away with them
until age 27, when the police finally were on to him.

When they appeared at his house, he resisted arrest
and had a shootout with the police

whereupon he walked into a storm bullets and committed
death by cop with his hellborn infamy destroyed forever.

Bob Boyd

25 and about finding the truth.
25 and about higher
states of consciousness.
25 and a full blown seeker,
I get initiated into a
meditation method
in a room in Cambridge, Mass
not far from Radcliffe
and Harvard U.

An elaborate ceremony,
an altar and incense burning,
the initiator a woman chanting.
I get a sacred Hindu mantra.
I begin to mentally repeat it

A minute later, I hear a
soft snapping sound in the
center of my forehead,
maybe where the third eye
is said to be, maybe not.

My consciousness expands
and its flooded with
indescribable bliss
beyond anything
I’d ever imagined.

I walk out of the
meditation room high and
feeling like a Hindu monk
in a flowing robe, feeling like
I’d come home, feeling like
I’d been a Hindu monk
in a former life.

Bob Boyd

A friend and I driving around in his father’s car, both of us sixteen with raging hormones.
A hot, voluptuous girl our age thumbs a ride. My friend gives her a lift.

She gets in the car in the front seat next to me, her perfume exhilarating. She rubs my leg and calls me chicken.

But I was unaffected, not even tempted to react to her challenge despite her beautiful face and voluptuous body.

She was sloppy drunk, and a woman drunk has always been a turn off to me.

Plus, it just wouldn’t have been right to take advantage of her in that vulnerable condition.

Though a troubled kid, I had some principles, and in some cases a solid sense of right and wrong.

But if I’d met her at a dance sober and looking as good as she did, I would have been enamored and wanting to get to know her.

Surprisingly, when we let her off at her destination, she thanked me for not taking advantage of her.

That was one of the few times I shined like a star in my wayward, wrong side of the tracks, troubled youth.

I remember it and write about it because of the rarity of me doing anything right and memorable when I was a teenage greaser, a loser and a rebel, though never a bully or in trouble with the Law.

Bob Boyd

As I became fascinating with dragons, I somehow got the idea of how cool it would look having a real life picture of a Celtic woman in a blue medieval dress hugging a large, subdued giant dragon.

I saw this as a reversal of the old legend of a princess imprisoned in a castle by an evil dragon that only a brave knight could save her from.

I saw it as a dragon imprisoned by her magical love and magnetic compassion.
And I liked the idea of that.

I feel there is probably more symbolism to that picture than I can imagine,
perhaps something like a liberating feminine symbol of a woman’s power.

Or maybe a deeper metaphysical meaning beyond my designing intention or comprehension.

Whether a simple or profound meaning, I love how great and realistic that picture looks.

Bob Boyd