Month: August 2024

Rasbora fish swimming joyfully
In my ten gallon aquarium,
Eighteen in a school of them.
I’d like to know if any thoughts
Come into their little heads,
Aside from mating and eating
And where they go when dead.
I’d hate to think they just die,
And that is the end of them,
As if they were unworthy of
Some kind of rasbora heaven.
Maybe the Hindus have it right
They reincarnate higher,
Maybe into a dog or a cat.
But rather than having to go
Through many incarnations
Some with joy some with strife
Repeatedly facing uncertainties
Maybe horrors and miseries
I’d rather they stayed as rasboras
And went to a rasbora heaven.

Bob Boyd

Claimed to be Christ come again
Built a flourishing cult worldwide
Alleged to have many powers
All his disciples fawned over him
He turned out to be a monster
Talked his disciples into infamy
killed people on Japan subways
Murdered them with sarin gas

Bob Boyd

Hells bells! Even chocolate can give you cancer now!
Does that dastardly cancer have to ruin everything?
I could accept cancer in fruits, vegetables, and red meat.
I could accept cancer in the environment and in plastics.
But chocolate? That’s the hill I’m willing to die of cancer on.

Bob Boyd

The ant scout found the food source
In an old lady’s old-fashioned kitchen,
Some chocolate syrup the old lady spilled
Behind the plastic kitchen trash container.
Excited, the scout left the trail of pheromones
For legions of worker ants to follow
Back to the syrup and was hailed a hero.

Worker ants marshaled their legions in formation
And marched into the old lady’s house,
Salivating at the thought of consuming the syrup.
But the old lady spied the advance columns
And sprayed all the advancing ants to death.
The scout got blamed for the botched mission
And summarily got kicked out of the colony.

In a last chance attempt to regain some glory,
He vowed to get even with the dowdy old lady.
He snuck in her house while she was sleeping
Crawled up her leg and planned to bite her butt
Foolishly believing like a bull elephant shot to death
He could end her large, old life with that single bite.

But he was intercepted by the startled old lady,
Who caught him between her wrinkled fingers
And foiled his misguided, quixotic attempt with
A death squeeze by those trusty old fingers.

Bob Boyd

She often wondered why she couldn’t have been born
Like her neighbor Jenny Lee who had everything,
Beautiful looks, a perfect body and oozing with charm,
Big boned, unattractive, and not acceptable to the in crowd,
She knew she was a better person than Jenny Lee,
But in the world she was born into that didn’t matter
If you didn’t have the superficial look and the right body.
Nobody asked her to dance at high school dances;
She was just another wallflower and she cried about that.
As she matured, she got over her envy and made do
With what nature had given her, and accepted her lot.
She also saw that with advantages come disadvantages,
And she made the best of her life and found happiness.

Bob Boyd

He never understood fans and followers;
Why they felt the need to follow others?
Why the need to fawn over others?
Did they not have enough self-value
To follow themselves and not risk
Being like numberless people,
Merely one of a herd of humans,
Mindlessly less by the need to follow,
Seemingly themselves not enough,
To be their own fans and follow no one?

Bob Boyd