Category: Poems

My girlfriend left
For another guy
My cat ran away
My dog died
My car broke down
I got laid off
From my job
Of twenty years
My doctor says
I’ve got cancer
And there is a
Monsoon outside

Bob Boyd

I’m leaving she said
I said okay
She said you’re not going to try to stop me
I said no you’re like a free agent
She said you’re not going to beg me to stay
I said I’m too proud to beg and too respectful
To try to talk you out of leaving
Baffled she decided to give us another chance
She decided to stay
Unbaffled I decided to leave

Bob Boyd

Kings and Queens
Princesses and Princes
Knights and Ladies
Kingdoms and Fiefdoms
Castles and Moats
O how I love Medieval History
Battles and Conquests
Bows drawn
Swords clanging
Knives stabbing
Lances piercing
Thousands slain
Massive carnage
Ungoverned bloodshed
O how I hate how bloody it was

Bob Boyd

She always used the expression smart as a whip
To describe people she deemed intelligent.
He hated that expression; it made no sense.
The only connection with smart to a whip
Was when your body smarted when it whipped you.
She never liked it when he said a person was cool
As if a temperature meant someone extra special.
They never told each other about those dislikes,
Their love more important than insignificant issues.

Bob Boyd

All she wanted was peace and harmony.
All he wanted was trouble and discord.
They tried to keep their relationship together
For three grating and insane years
Until they drove each other crazy,
Till their doctors prescribed them pills to
Medicate their minds and relationship ills.
Miraculously after that they lived happily ever after.

Bob Boyd

She liked watching the birds at her birdfeeder
Fluttering about the feeder seeking seeds
Until rogue squirrels scared the birds away
And ate all the birdseed and angered her.
Half crazy from the get go, she screamed
And charged the marauding squirrels,
Tripped and fell on her angry face.
The fall brought her to sane senses.
She bought a squirrel proof bird feeder.
And graciously fed the squirrels corn,
A satisfying compromise for each and all.

Bob Boyd

She said she knew me in a former life
Inwardly I scoffed at that
Another crazy
Why always me
I should have known
By the way she dressed
Like a neo hippie
Or a white witch
Though she was beautiful
I couldn’t do crazy
Did crazy too many times
Never worked out
I became crazy too
From the bizarre nonsense
And scatterbrained beliefs
But when she touched my hand
My mind reeled back to former lives
Like watching them in a movie
I saw she had been my wife
In the High Middle Ages, 1662

Bob Boyd

Rich or poor
Famous or unknown
In the end
Both go to the grave
Neither matter much
The world keeps spinning
Both keep dying
The sun keeps shining
Both fade away
It’s always the same
Like a cosmic game
If people reincarnate
Maybe the rich
Come back poor
And the poor
Come back rich

Bob Boyd

He sought God through prayer, song, and church.
He studied in a prestigious seminary all day long.
Eventually he became a pastor of a Baptist Church.
A Christian woman, she knew he was the man for her.
When he courted her, things were heavenly.
When he married her, things became like hell.
He controlled her every move, told her what to do.
Trapped and smothered under his despotic rule,
She had an affair with a less religious church member.
Left her preacher husband, married him.
Her new husband died under criminal circumstances,
A bullet to the head. And a preacher is praying
In church to Jesus for forgiveness for his heinous sin.

Bob Boyd

My dog named Bo is the greatest dog I’ve ever had.
He’s a big, shaggy mongrel, and sometimes I swear he has ESP.
When I introduced him to my hot, new girlfriend named Mona,
He barked and growled at her despite her attempts to appease him.
He wouldn’t even take some tempting dog treats she tried to give him.
I yelled at him to stop growling and barking at Mona,
But he wouldn’t listen, and I had to lock him in a room.
After that Mona said she was okay with Bo’s bad behavior
And graciously surprised me with a whip cream vanilla latte.
I took a sip of the delicious concoction that tasted heavenly
Until my vision became hazy. The room spun. And I passed out.
When I came to hours later, my watch, my wallet, my credit cards,
my laptop and all the money in my ATM …gone.
After I calmed down from the shock and the rage,
I let a barking Bo out of the room I had shut him away in.
He looked at me with unconditional love in his loving brown eyes,
His tail wagging. And he never said I told you so.

Bob Boyd

He hung out with drug users
The high was everything
Elevated ecstasies in pills
Eradications of misery
And depressing downers
When he told his
Drug user friends he
Had terminal cancer
They didn’t want to
Hear about his suffering
They didn’t want to
Know he was dying
They were too high
To care and didn’t want
His bad news to
Bring them down

Bob Boyd

She had a great life
Plenty of money
A debonair boyfriend
A dog she called Flossy
A BMW
A lifetime inheritance

She threw it all away
When she hired a hitman
To kill her ex-husband
Because of a custody battle
She was losing

The hitman ended the
Problem ex-husband
But he got caught
And ratted her out
For a lesser sentence
And the woman who
Had it all rots in prison
And her two kids lost
A mother and a father

Bob Boyd

You’re young
You’re ripe with life
You’re gonna life forever
Young, fun, and so alive
You see old people
Shuffling by
You know you’ll
Never share their
Antiquated fates
You know your
Moment is
Forever
Except for
Rare times when
Truth grabs you
By the neck and
Strangles some
Sense into you
But you ignore
The suffocation of
Knowing one day
You’ll be shuffling too

Bob Boyd

Born twisted
Unreformable
Never had a chance
Unsurprisingly
She led a
Crime-filled life
Got caught
Drugging
Robbing
Lonely men
In seedy hotels
Went to prison
Even religion
Couldn’t save
Her
When preached
To in prison
Got out of
Prison
Went back in
Again
For seven
Years
Got out
Found a
Boyfriend
Who cheated on
Her
Went psychotic
Killed him
Went to jail
For life
Never had
A prayer

Bob Boyd

You come into this world alone
Friends come
Friends go
Good times
And bad times pass
Boyfriends, girlfriends
Husbands, wives
Come and go
If not by volition
Then by death
And you go out of his world alone

Bob Boyd

At some point when you get old
You’re just waiting around to die
Time speeds up to accommodate you
Days and nights grow shorter
And you’re body is telling you too:
Get the hell out of here
Life has no more use for you

Bob Boyd

They left chicken bones and chicken heads
And blood on the altar, a Satanic sacrifice
In an old abandoned church,
A desecration of a once holy site.

They sacrificed crazy John White’s cat as well
And cut off his head,
Which was a more dangerous mistake
Than those responsible could have imagined.

John loved his cat like a member of his family,
And John was one tough, crazy hombre nobody
Wanted to fool with.

He found out who was responsible for killing his cat,
The leader of a wannabe Satanic cult, Evil One John.

He hunted Evil One John down, slew him with a sword, and
Cut off his head.

And put it on the altar of the church to freak
Out the wannabe satanists when they held their next sacrifice.

He hid with has AR-15 assault rifle the night they all entered the church
And screamed. He leaped out of his hiding spot, shot them all to death when they
Stormed out of the church terrified.

The police never solved the case, and John White got a new cat.

Bob Boyd

A Nonviolent Man with a Violent Woman

He drove as far away as he could from her,
Frightened by her abuse, mindful of her threat to kill him,
Ashamed he had been so unmanly
that he let her abuse of him happen.

Disappointed in himself when he never reported her for stabbing
Him in his shoulder and maybe stopping her violence
By having her jailed for attempting to kill him.

Now a too peaceful, too nonviolent man he realizes he’s a coward,
But at least by fleeing he’s still alive for now,
And no longer trapped in the toxicity of her twisted love.

She stalked him before when he fled to another state,
And give him a near death beating, her love brutal and obsessive.

When he reached Tulsa,Texas, he bought a pistol to shoot her with if
she found him again, which he felt sure she would do.

But when she showed up a year later, with a demonlike look in her blazing eyes
And breathing fire with the torrent of threats she screamed at him
And with a machete in her hand

For the first time in their insane relationship he stood up to her.
He aimed his gun at her enraged face and threatened to shoot her
If she didn’t leave him alone and get the hell out of his life.

When she charged him screaming like a female berserker swinging the machete,
He dropped the gun and let her hack him to death and end his unending fear and misery.

Bob Boyd

Saturday rolls around just like another day
Now that he’s retired and liberated from
The workday controls and time constrictions
That ruled his life for over seventy years.
Now that he’s free and no one controls him
Or runs interference on his activities,
He does whatever he pleases.

Bob Boyd

He wrote his poems just to create
He no longer cared about getting published
He enjoyed the satisfaction of the process
Writing poems about everything he imagined
Amazed at the things he could make up
As an old man with a shrinking brain and body
Like a one last gasp of creative activity
That helped to keep him alive and well

Bob Boyd