Poems by Bob Boyd

Mary Callahan lived a simple, quiet life.
Never had a lot of money, raised in a poor family,
Good, honest, noble people, supportive and kind.
Never knew the high life and its excesses,
Didn’t desire extravagances or expensive things.
Never cared for overpriced, fancy restaurants,
Content with inexpensive ones minus the glitz.
Never compromised her praiseworthy ethics,
Trustworthy in her work, true in her love.
Never cheated on her devoted, faithful husband,
Married at 17, kept her vows, sacred to her.
Never paid attention when told young love doesn’t last,
Stayed married to her husband until he died at age 55.
Never married or went with another man after he died,
Believed she’d be with her husband when she passed away.
Never missed a Sunday church service,
Brought food and joy to homebound church members.
Never shirked family responsibilities,
Raised her dead daughter’s child, worked two jobs to do it,
A true and humble high value woman.

Bob Boyd

A sweet college girl
pretty and quite smart
she got drunk at a bar
one night and became
separated from her
college friends

how that happened
to this day is a
mystery

maybe her friends
were too drunk to
care or notice her
absence from them

I only know when
she stumbled out
of the bar at 2:30 am
she was never seen
again until her violated
remains were found
hidden in some tall
grass on the side
of a lone highway

I read the story in
the news and see
a photo of her

maybe it’s foolish
maybe it’s futile
but I look look into
her eyes in the photo
and say I’m sorry
you went out that
horrible way

and I pray to God
that she’s in a place
where it won’t matter
that she died so young
in such a horrible way

and I wonder why in a
world supposedly
under a loving God
so many horrible and
evil things keep
happening

Bob Boyd

I hear the werewolf howling in my backyard
under the foreboding night’s full moon.
His blood curdling howls so terrifying my body
begins to shake, goosebumps rise on my skin,
the curly hair on my head stands straight up.
And I thank the Lord above that my brother
the loopy loup-garou only wants some
of his favorite midnight snack, Kibbles n’ Bits,
and isn’t about to dismember me.

Bob Boyd

She was brought up in a religious family;
some of her family members were high
up in the mega church they belonged to.

She met a nice Christian man, fell in love
with him, and they married.

After they married, she got a job as a
secretary in a Christian college and
met a charming, handsome young
Christian student there.

Surprisingly, given her longstanding
Christian faith, an affair ensued with
the young Christian student.

One day her Christian student lover
said to her, “Why don’t you get a divorce?”

She replied, “Oh no, we don’t get divorced
in my church, but if he were to die ….”

Shockingly, given the student was a Christian,
he murdered her husband for her, so they
could be together and marry someday.

The police never found them out, and, maybe
because they couldn’t live with their shared
infamy, they broke up after the murder.

Years later, she was married to a dentist
and had twin kids. He finished his degree
at the college where they met and went on
to higher studies at another college.

One day the police decided to open the
cold case of her husband’s murder, maybe
with a new investigator who just wanted to
get his bearings on the case.

When the police found her home and knocked on
her front door and identified themselves,
though she wasn’t a suspect, she thought
she was and confessed everything to them.

I wondered how she and her student lover
could even consider such a murderous sin.
Then I thought maybe they were of the belief
that once saved by Jesus always saved.

Or maybe they believed that
they’d be forgiven if they confessed their
sin and begged Christ for forgiveness
their unholy act would be forgiven.

Whatever their thinking, it has always
baffled me that those two young Christians
could be so diabolical as to concoct
such an evil plan and go through with it.

Bob Boyd

The witness was so cocky he told the police he
didn’t need any protection in the city of Woburn, Mass.
where had consented to tell what he knew in a court of law
about a gang’s illegal activities in the north of the city.

Shortly after that, he vanished from sight,
and the police had no clues to where he had gone.
They suspected the worst, and they were right
when they found his arm in a city dump.

They knew that the gang in the north of the city
had eliminated the star witness in their case,
but they had no evidence to prove what they knew,
and the murder of the cocky witness was never solved.

Bob Boyd

I cannot imagine
a woman
or a man
psychopath born
psychopath dead
cast into the
fires of Hell
by a loving
reasonable God.

If you believe
I’m wrong
how can you
account for a
God who’d send
a psychopath
into the world
without heaven’s hope?

Bob Boyd

I couldn’t watch when they lowered your little coffin
In the ground at that Philippines cemetery in Davao
I couldn’t watch your six years of challenged life ended that way.
I just couldn’t bear it. I was holding back a thousand tears.
My heart was breaking with the worst heartaches of my life.
I had to stay in the background on that saddest of sad days.

I couldn’t get up close and watch that coffin lowered in the ground
With you such a little child, who never had a chance in life, dead in it.

Your mother was able to stand there and watch
God bless her, I don’t know how.

Born with water on the brain, you never had a chance.
No playgrounds, no schools, no friends, no high school
No girlfriends, no proms, no jobs, no love life, nothing.
You couldn’t walk or talk and your six years spent helpless in a bed, Seemingly oblivious to the world and your surroundings.

How my heart grieved for you, even though you weren’t my son.
I hope to see you in the afterlife, healed, happy and walking and talking.

And I hope you got a reward in the higher life for how
Shortchanged you were in this life.
Breaks my heart you didn’t have a better life.

Bob Boyd

When I first heard about soulmates,
I fell in love with the romantic idea
of finding the perfect one
that you would be with forever.

Like I’m sure many have found out,
finding a soulmate eludes many,
as it has me.

Then I came up with the thought,
perhaps a foolish crazy notion,
that maybe people who don’t find
their soulmates in this life
find them in the afterlife.

Related to that notion, I once read
a title of a man’s near death experience:
He Met His Soulmate in the Afterlife.

I didn’t believe it. I didn’t read it.
I felt it was contrived, and it was
the first NDE I’ve ever heard of,
after reading and listening to many,
of anyone meeting a soulmate while
clinically dead temporarily.

I have read of deathbed visions
where a spouse sees the deceased
spouse waiting for her or him
in the white light of the afterlife.

That gave me a little hope of
the possibility of enduring
romantic love in an everlasting
afterlife.

I’m probably mistaken in thinking
or wishing, that maybe, just maybe
we all find our soulmates
in the afterlife.

And it surprises me that as an old
man now, I still think of such
silly and romantic things,
but perhaps the saying is true,
there’s no fool like an old fool.

But wouldn’t it be heavenly if
my foolish romantic notion were
true, and we all found our soulmates
in the afterlife. And those that
found their soulmates in this life
would be reunited forever there too.

I find that more satisfying, like
a wonderful fairy tale ending, than
the thought of romantic love
being merely a temporary condition
limited to a brief, earthly life

Bob Boyd

I’m here because you probably
never heard of me.

In a book that hosts a single
poem of mine

it is written I lived around 1070
and was born in the Sung
capital of Kaifeng
and was an official
in the provinces.

It also reads “I had a brief
moment of fame in
literary circles.”

The reason the moment
was brief is because
I didn’t care about worldly fame.
I knew it was fleeting and
eventually we all
fade into obscurity.

And though I wrote poems
all my life, I didn’t try to
gain public recognition
for any of them.

I knew that even if I
did gain mountains of
recognition and fame
those things never endure

I was more interested
in embracing the Tao
and achieving immortality.

Long ago I read
it was better to
have loved and lost
than to never have loved at all

As a loser at love
I agree with that
and my heart goes out
to the many people
in this world who have
never had a chance to
win or lose at love

who pined for romantic love
all their lives
who saw so many others have it
in poems, books, movies
and in real life

but never them
who lost at finding the love
they never had

Bob Boyd