Poems by Bob Boyd

Consider this a public service
in case you have to deal with vampires.

I learned a revelation from
watching a vampire movie today:
that a silver bullet not only
dispatches snarling werewolves
but those of the vampiric persuasion
as well.

I learned, to my surprise, that hawthorn
is highly effective as a deterrent,
and if you strike or stick a vampire
with a branch or even a twig, it renders
the creature of the night helpless enough
to effortlessly drive anything resembling
a stake through its evil heart
or to escape from it.

Of course, the old standbys still work:
crosses, regular or with Jesus on them.

Garlic around doors and windows
and on your person.

Some say crystals and charms
work too, but I wouldn’t bet
your unvampirized soul on it.

Better to stick with the tried and true.

Bob Boyd

I hate the monkey see monkey do
of people who parrot the latest sayings
and the latest words or phrases:
echo chamber, disingenuous, FAFO, et cetera.
I’m way better than being a mindless parrot,
but you do you.

Bob Boyd

I went to Walmart last night for the first time
in over a decade.

Upon entering the automatically opening doors,
the store ambience felt oppressive to me.

It all seemed too phony to me and I hated
how overcrowded it was.

It hearkened back to decades ago when
I heard groceries cost less at Walmart.

I went there with the prudent idea of
saving a lot of money

I filled my grocery cart with ten or twelve items
and rolled my cart to the cash registers lanes.

They had twenty or more of them with
only three open.

At those three the lines was at least
twelve people deep.

I got so exasperated at those long
and slow moving lanes

I said screw this and got out of
the lane I was in

and rolled my shopping cart and the items
back to where I had put the items in the cart.

I put the items back on the shelves
and never shopped for groceries

at Walmart again.

Tonight I had the same feeling
and walked out the automatically opening doors

without buying anything.

And I’ll never set foot in
a Walmart store again.

Bob Boyd

She was 25 or so
and sitting in the cancer ward.

No telling if the cancer she had
was going to kill her.

Imagine being in your twenties
and having cancer
and in the back of your mind
having to wonder
if you were going to live or die.

I heard her tell an older woman
that she had a new boyfriend.

I hoped to God she was going
to live long enough
for that relationship to blossom.

Bob Boyd

She looks in the mirror at 70 years of age
and sees a woman much younger there
that it pleases her to see.

It’s as if she has near eternal beauty that
even the years cannot entirely erase.

But when she sees a photo of herself
it disappoints her to see an old graying woman
with wrinkles, lines and age spots on her face.

She finds the illusion of her youthful mirror beauty
as mysterious as how time that used to
practically stand still when she was young
races by faster and faster now that she is older
and worryingly closer to the grave.

Bob Boyd

The betta swims around
in his ten gallon water home

sometimes he passes hidden
times in his betta cave
until he swims to the surface
for some needed oxygen

sometimes he blows bubbles
on the surface of the water
at the top of the aquarium

supposedly he’s making a nest
for the birth of a baby betta
despite not having a love

supposedly you can’t keep a
love with him because
like deadly human spouses
one will kill the other

maybe when he blows the bubbles
he’s dreaming of a betta soulmate
and what could have been
if he didn’t have such a
bad temperament and preferred
to be a solitary fish.

Maybe he’s not much different
from loveless humans dreaming
and wishing they had a love.

Bob Boyd

Though her looks faded
with the ruinations of time
she remained beautiful
on her glorious inside

and it gave her a glow
more beautiful than
her lost youthful looks

the glow was even
greater on the day she
died with a smile on
her ever lovely face.

Bob Boyd

We live in a world of spinning planets
like an infinite sea of spinning tops,
spinning tops that never stop.

God must be like a magician who
singularly keeps all these tops spinning
and spinning and spinning and spinning.

And I wonder how vast is the unobservable universe
and how many spinning planets inhabit it
and if anybody, no matter how smart,
really knows anything about it.

Bob Boyd

They followed their political party like lemmings,
that derided patriotism, ruined our country.
They didn’t care about the evil it had done.
Some didn’t realize they supported the evil.
They were made politically stupid by the MSM,
spoon-fed fake news and blatant lies daily,
oblivious to what was really going on in the world,
oblivious to the fall of a once great republic.
Thank God the infamy has ended, and the
republic is being restored to its patriotic glory.

Bob Boyd

A guy in New Jersey named Chris
at the great age of twenty-six
has spent $4,000 on his collection
of creepy dolls starting at age
sixteen when he became obsessed.

Some could say he has a creepy hobby
that he’s blown thousands of dollars on.
I say why not if it makes him happy.

And though I’m not into creepy dolls
or any other kind of dolls,
not even the celebrated Barbie,
I’d like to see Chris’s collection.
I’d like to see just how creepy
some of his creepy dolls are.

Bob Boyd