I see a rabbit outside my apartment
in the dark at night.
He stares at me, and for a moment
I think he’s not going to fear me.
I speak to him softly, and I move
slowly so not to scare him.
Just when I think I have befriended
him, he dashes away.
I think to myself maybe the rabbit
and I will be friends another day.
Bob Boyd
The heedless government allowed
hundreds of thousands to sneak in
it’s once peaceful city.
They were unvetted, military age men
who didn’t share the country’s values,
who didn’t respect their women or
their laws.
As a result, crime rose, shoplifting,
pickpocketing, rapes, knife attacks.
Now the city is an unsafe, shrinking
hellscape people are fleeing from.
Bob Boyd
I feel in love with
Amy Wasserman
at first sight
She had
peach-colored skin
golden brown eyes
honey brown hair
a comely figure
a beautiful face
the sweetest voice
I fell out of love
with her at
second sight
she had too many
complaints
became way
too annoying
frayed my nerves
repeatedly
we didn’t
have a damn thing
in common.
Bob Boyd
An old melancholic romantic
sits alone in an apartment
listening to an old love song
captured by the song’s lyrics
he pines for one last love
before he dies and is buried
never finding that final love
his lifeless body in a coffin
his last tears in his eyes
Bob Boyd
He’s hiking alone in a forest
and everything becomes quiet.
He senses imminent danger in
the sudden hush.
His pulse quickens, his heart
pounds faster.
He decides to hike back to
his car on the edge of the park
to escape the unseen horror.
He sees the air vibrating all
around him, his heart stops,
as he’s sucked into a vortex
Where he blacks out and
never wakes up.
He’s now a 411 statistic,
and has never been found.
Bob Boyd
He bought flowers for a girlfriend
he hadn’t seen in 40 years.
Their’s had been a teenage love
that lasted only for 2 years.
But he pined for her all his life,
never quite got over her.
When he finally got to see her
she’d been dead a few years.
He gently placed the flowers
he bought her upon her grave,
and told her he’d always love
her as tears fell from his eyes.
Bob Boyd
When he died, he saw the light,
beckoning him to enter it.
But because he had lived in darkness
as a serial killer, killing many people,
he feared and sensed the light would
capture him and take him to hell.
So he never entered it, preferring to
roam the earth as a renegade ghost,
haunting houses and people forever.
Bob Boyd
He had many loves in his life,
starting at the age of 16.
Some lasted for months,
some for years.
Some he married; some
he divorced.
None lasted permanently.
One love almost did, but
she went away sick,
preferring to be a martyr
than burden their love.
Now he’s an old man
alone and without a love.
Bob Boyd
We had everything in common.
We loved each others’ looks.
Our love life was spectacular.
But all those perks were not enough
to keep us together for more than a year.
An introvert and an extrovert and both
headstrong, we just couldn’t get along.
Bob Boyd
After reading a book of an elderly woman’s poems,
I wonder if she is still alive in this old, dry world.
I see that she has left it and wonder if any tears
fell to the ground and wet the earth in memory of her.
Bob Boyd
I loved those hippie women of the sixties and seventies,
wished I could have been with one.
I loved their free-spiritedness and their fashion sense.
I loved the song about the flower girl, imagined
how magical it would have been to meet one.
But because I wasn’t a hippie back then, though
kind of like a hippie in spirit, I never got to be with one.
Now as an old man with my memories of
those beautiful free-spirited, freewheeling hippie women,
I wish I could be with an old ex-hippie woman
to talk about things like higher consciousness, Eastern
Spirituality, the Age of Aquarius, and peace and love with.
Bob Boyd
She was just a teenager when she left this world,
stabbed and strangled to death.
Before she was murdered, she played softball
and was involved in many school activities.
And based on her involvements and great grades,
she seemed like she had a future
until she got pregnant and told her boyfriend.
Her boyfriend, just 16, didn’t want the responsibility
of a child at his age.
He asked her to get an abortion, but she refused.
Shortly after that, her corpse was found in a dumpster,
and it didn’t take a super sleuth to know who killed her.
Her murderous boyfriend now sits in prison, and
he’ll be in there for the rest of his life
while her dead body is buried at Rosewood Cemetery,
her plans, her dreams, her future destroyed.
But I believe her soul is in a heaven with her baby happier than she ever could have been on earth.
Bob Boyd
She thought she found her Prince Charming
three times.
She married those three Prince Charmings
who weren’t charming after she married them.
Now an old woman she’s given up on love.
She spends her days watching soap operas
and relates to them because she’s lived
in three marital soap operas filled with drama.
She has a toy poodle she calls Ralph,
says he’s better company than any of those
fake Prince Charmings ever could have been.
Bob Boyd
He had a girlfriend named Sara
who had a weird doll.
She held that doll, she called
Clara, as if it were a real child.
Because Sara was heartbreakingly hot,
I tried to overlook her doll obsession.
But I must admit the doll creeped me out,
and it often seemed to look at me,
with evil in its plastic eyes.
For the two months I was with Sara,
bad things happened to me.
I got laid off from my job.
My car got stolen, never found.
I got a wicked case of COVID,
nearly died from it.
Crazy as it may seem, I believe
that doll was cursing me.
I think it was because it was jealous
of the attention Sara was giving me.
When I broke up with Sara, the
bad luck ended.
I have no doubt that lifted the doll’s
curse, which I believe would have
killed me had I stayed with Sara.
Bob Boyd
I knew Vivian in high school when she
was a fun and studious girl.
I had a crush on her, and felt she had
a crush on me,
but we never really got to know
each other,
like a might-have-been or a love
lost.
After graduation, at a post-high school party
that I was unable to attend,
she got drunk for the first time, and on the
way home,
she lost control of her car and died instantly
when she plowed into a semi-trailer truck.
Now I see Vivian in occasional dreams,
telling me she misses me
and saying we’ll be together soon, which,
I must confess, scares the hell out of me.
Bob Boyd