Poems by Bob Boyd

They called him the son of Satan
and god almighty he seemed like it.
He had the face of an alter boy
or a wholesome boy next door.
That’s what sixty women thought that
he caught in his net of torture and death.
He did unspeakably abominable things
to all those women for days and hours
before slowly slicing them all to death.

He got sentenced to many lifetimes
in prison when he should have
been given a death sentence.
An avenging prisoner, the brother
of one of the woman he savaged,
gave him the death sentence he
deserved by stabbing him to death
sixty times with a handmade shiv.

Bob Boyd

It’s hard to imagine
how there were the Thuggee
in India who strangled people to death
seemingly without any guilt,
supposedly for the goddess Kali.

They are thought to have killed
up to 30,000 people,
strangling them all to death
and stealing their money and goods.

I supposed they covered up any guilt
with the excuse they were killing people
as offerings to their imagined god
instead of purely for murder
and for theft.

Bob Boyd

Cheerful, happy people
they had what he wanted
the peace and the joy
he was missing
in his unfulling life.

His girlfriend had left him.
his life seemed to lack purpose.
He wanted what those people had.

They said their leader was God,
and he seemed like he might be
with his charisma and his holiness
And dressed in a robe like a holy man.

Six months after he joined them
he saw they were only a cult
following a charlatan in a robe.
He left them and met a new girlfriend
and found more peace and joy in her
than he ever did in the cult.

Bob Boyd

He saw a thunderbird gliding
in a circle in the blue, summer sky
about a hundred feet above his head.
He wasn’t on drugs or imagining it.
He felt like he’d been blessed
to see a supposedly mythical bird.
He knew few people would believe him
if he told them what he saw.
Then the thunderbird flapped its wings
and thunder boomed in the sky
before it vanished into a portal.

Bob Boyd

He jogged and jogged and jogged
on sidewalks in many cities
on hot days and cold days
in summers and winters.

He ran fast and he ran slow
and he always ran alone.

Sometimes people yelled at him.
Sometimes dogs chased him.
But they didn’t deter him;
He kept jogging every day.

But the sneaky sidewalks
ended his jogging days
with a knee injury
that even an operation
didn’t properly heal.

So he became a walker
and never got injured again.

Bob Boyd

While she was crazily unhinged
over his political choices,
she told him he was nuts
despite her acting that way.

She thought she knew it all
about the political scene,
even though her frame of
reference was a biased
fake news TV show.

Her low info political tantrum
drove him away, and though
he was politically stupid
compared to her astute
political knowledge from
the one fake news show,
she cried all day when
he was gone and wondered
how he was unable to see how
brainwashed and dimwitted
he had become politically
by watching stupid alternative
news shows on the Internet.

Bob Boyd

He read there were microplastics in honey
and maybe in everything else.

Supposedly those microplastics could cause cancer.
He thought to himself what can’t cause cancer nowadays.

It’s supposedly in goddamn everything you breath in or eat,
and one day it’s not in some of those things

like how eggs are dangerous to eat one day
and healthy as hell to eat the next day,

like how chocolate is good for you heart one day
and contaminated with lead and cadmium the next day.

He gulped down two spoons of store bought honey
he had stirred into his instant coffee

savored two delicious pieces of Hershey chocolate
and thought screw it, we’re all going to die.

Bob Boyd

It grew colder and colder in her apartment.
She had on many layers of clothing.
Her heat had gotten too expensive.
She was afraid of the high cost of getting warm
and didn’t turn on the heat in her apartment.
She wondered if she could endure the freezing cold
as she began to shiver some more.
Her government had cut off the heat benefit,
which helped her to barely afford the cost of heat.
She had only a pauper’s pension,
barely enough to survive,
and the cost of heat was no longer affordable.
Her breathing became shallow;
she could feel the cold in her bones.
She began feeling drowsy even
though she didn’t think she was tired.
Her teeth chattered and she became disoriented
and took off all her clothes and succumbed to the cold,
leaving the world naked and frozen to death.

Bob Boyd

She was described as an oversexed, trashy person
who thought she was the belle of the ball.

She was said to have a deep black hole inside her
and a deceptive heart and a demonic soul.

She was skilled in the spidery dark arts of marrying for love
and killing for profit.

Her siren like looks and charms seduced and netted monied men
The seven she married in seven states had big insurance policies.

Six of them ended up dead and she got obscenely rich, but when
she failed at killing number seven in Texas, he shot her in the head.

Bob Boyd

The grass shivered.
The rocks quietly coughed.
The trees shook off the offending snowflakes.
The insects hunkered down.
A bird flitted about on a telephone wire
when the snow settled down.
I don’t know where the other birds went.
Nary a squirrel or a chipmunk was seen,
but a few rabbits frolicked in the snow.
As for me, I stayed inside watching movies
and drinking coffee and hot chocolate.

Bob Boyd