Poems by 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 freed from that plastic prison forever.

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

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

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