Poems by Bob Boyd

I don’t know about you, but I could never live
in those rocket ships astronauts travel in space with.

Instead of being a space cowboy, I’d be a space coward.

For example, the Boring Starliner rocket that the
astronauts were trapped in for over 9 months
was 390 cubic feet.

It was no larger than a small room or a large closet.

I’d get claustrophobic in such a small space
for even a day.

I’d fear things that could go wrong in space,
a barely known place.

I’d fear being blown up in a take off explosion blast.

I’m nowhere near as brave as those fearless
space travelers.

But I would be heroically brave in other circumstances.

Without hesitation, I would have taken a bullet for a young woman I used to work with.

I was too old for her for a romance, even though I know she had a crush on me, and I would have wanted to be with her if there hadn’t been over 40 years between us.

I had something close to unconditional love for her.

Because I’d lived a full life, I easily could have afforded to die for her.

I could not bear the thought of her hopes, dreams, her life ending in such a horrible way.

Despite that gallant thought, which I would have gone through with instantly,

I’d be a coward in living like the brave astronauts traveling in a rocket ship no larger than a small room.

Bob Boyd

I glance out of my second floor apartment window and see a sparrow sitting on top of the For Rent Sign stuck in the lawn for the vacant apartment below me.

The sparrow looks left and right and flies to the ground, maybe for a worm, if sparrows eat worms like robins.

Maybe he saw some other delicious morsel like a small bug.

He flies back on the top of the sign and doesn’t appear to be eating.

I’m wondering what he’s really thinking about sitting on top of that sign.

I know he’s not considering moving in, and I know he has a cortex with many neurons just like I do, so maybe he can think like me.

Then I wonder if he is pondering the nature of existence or maybe kinda like a Zen Buddhist contemplating the sound of one wing flapping.

I try to telepathically get inside his head to plumb his thoughts and the depths of his avian brain, but it’s a cold and rainy day, my brain waves are askew,

and my psychic transmissions have been rendered partly cloudy, and the sparrow has flown away anyhow, perhaps having psychically

divined what I was about and decided to fly away to avoid my faux pas invasion of his feathered privacy.

Bob Boyd

I remember how when my first girlfriend
a lovely teenage, blonde beauty,
would stare into my eyes with
this look that said she wanted
me to kiss her.

In those incomparable moments,
everything vanished from sight,
except her mesmerizing look.

It was as if the entire universe,
the entire world, and everything in it
except her look became nonexistent.

And her kiss, that sweet kiss,
took me beyond this world
into a place that felt like a heaven.

Bob Boyd

In 1897, Elva Zona Heaster Shue was buried and alleged to have died of natural causes without an autopsy in Greenbrier County, West Virginia.

Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, saw Elva in a dream, and Elva told her that Elva’s husband, Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue had murdered her.

Mary Jane visited the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston and told him about the dream.

Maybe because Preston had suspicions Erasmus had murdered a deceased ex-wife, whether or not he believed Mary, he ordered an autopsy of Elva’s body.

The autopsy revealed Elva had been strangled to death, her neck broken, her windpipe crushed and bruising around her neck.

A trial ensued, and Erasmus was found guilty of the murder of Elva Zona Heaster Shue, and she became known as the Greenbrier Ghost.

Bob Boyd

George Gilligan, his wife, Theresa, and
his two children, Lisa, 5 and Gregory, 4
arrived at their home in Evansville,
Indiana on January 14, 1980
and were shot to death by a killer
named Donald Ray Wallace,
who had been robbing their home.

It so sad and so tragic that often in
this world, good people who harmed
no one are randomly murdered, as
if this life is often like a matter of
good or bad luck.

And even though most of us feel safe
and take precautions to avoid being
victims of murders, sometimes we
become the randomly murdered like
all those who felt as if random murders
only happened to other, unknown people
they saw or heard about on the news.

Bob Boyd

Bob Boyd

I see the tree leaves dancing in the wind
outside my apartment window. It’s
as though the wind has miraculously
imbued them with life.
I wonder if the leaves have any awareness
of how the wind feels against their epidermis,
and if the feel of the wind is pleasing to them.
Were I a leaf, I think I’d like the feel of the wind
and the joy and the fun of dancing in it.

Bob Boyd

How beautiful are the white tree petals blossoming on the tree next to the second floor apartment I live in. When I was working, I never noticed them, perhaps blinded by the business of my daily affairs and not as aware of nature budding before me as I am now that I’m retired and my eyes have opened more to the goings on outside my apartment in the street and surroundings below. And I am wondering how long those beautiful petals will last before they die like me and everything else does in this temporary life that used to seem like it was forever when was when I was a child and like those newly blossomed white tree petals. And dying was something that only happened to old people, who seemed born old and destined to die.

Bob Boyd

I saw a documentary by David Paulides who writes books about the missing 411 people, those who have vanished, usually in national parks under mysterious circumstances with no confirmable traces of what happened to them.

For example, a person goes missing, and all that is found of him is his shoes and trackers, search and rescue dogs, and others never find him or any clues as to what happened to him.

Now, as many have speculated about the 411s, David Paulides seems to have joined the chorus of the very real possibility that aliens are silently and stealthily snatching 411s from this world.

When you watch his documentary, you see some credible people who had encounters with aliens, one who like a fish thrown back in the water, was told he wasn’t what the aliens wanted and returned to earth dazed and astonished by the abduction.

I’m at an age when I no longer feel like hiking. But after reading and listening to many accounts of missing 411s and the allegedly hundreds of thousands that have gone missing in national parks and elsewhere, were I younger, I doubt I’d ever go hiking in forests again, like I did when I was younger. Unless I went with a group of people and one or more of them were armed.

When you read and/or listen to enough of these cases with even hunters and trackers among the 411 missing, it’s easy to get paranoid about hiking in a forest alone or with others.

Bob Boyd

Cold spell has dropped in just when it was getting
comfortably warm, just when I was enjoying it.
Annoys me when the weather becomes so inconsistent
from warm to cold.

I’m fine with it staying one way or the other, but to have a cold spell as spring as set in, and flowers have begun to awaken into the warmth, is disturbing to me.

I don’t care when the weather’s wintry how cold it becomes as long as it stays consistently cold.
Likewise with warm weather I prefer a consistency rather than wavering from 70 degrees to 40.

Perhaps became I’m in a much older body, my inner thermostat has gotten cranky just like some old men supposedly do.

If that’s so, hopefully my disposition never gets cranky too.

Bob Boyd

Holding cells in the castle where people were imprisoned
hundreds of years ago.
Metal holding rings prisoners were chained to.
Some were thrown into a pit and left to die there.
Others were hanged off the front of the building.
And spirits are alleged to swarm the castle.
Ghosts moan, chains rattle, people see ghosts in
the mirrors.
Things get thrown around in rooms.
Sheets tossed off beds people are sleeping in.
In one room, stones appear and drop to the floor.
St Briavels Castle is truly a strange and haunted place.

Bob Boyd