Category: Poems

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

Even though he didn’t know what
imamorate meant,
he had one.

It lasted for seven unlucky years
with her and him
driving each other crazy
until his inamorata left him
and he became her
persona non grata.

Bob Boyd

The kids in high school laughed at her clueless
questions in all her classes.
They said she was stupid for asking so many
dumb questions for things, which
should have been easily obvious.
They stopped the laughing and the ridicule
when she got all A’s in all her classes
and became the class valedictorian.

Bob Boyd

he never did anything of value,
drank too much and always screwed up.
never could hold a job or a woman.
spent his final days homeless
living in homeless shelters
and on the stone cold streets
drunk and begging for money.
bemoaned living a worthless life,
regretted having wasted his
years in drunkenness and failure
until he found some redemption
when he overcame his drinking,
when he became like a saint
helping legions of homeless people
get out of the streets and
quit their debilitating addictions
and get help for their physical
and/or mental health conditions
and lead better, happier lives.

when he died, a thousand people
attended his funeral and felt sure
he’d found a place in heaven.

Bob Boyd

Don’t feed the trolls, people say.
They’re just meanspirited people
hungering for some attention.
Imagine if you could push a button
and zap the troll’s computers
and cell phones into oblivion.
Imagine if you could shut them off
forever and ever from the Internet
and just have decent and polite
people engaging in friendly chats.

Bob Boyd

He never got over
the death of his
beautiful wife
of over 30
wonderful years.

Even ten years
later, his eyes
still tear up
when he holds
one of her dresses
and thinks of her.

When he holds one
of her dresses,
he imagines her
still in it and sighs.

Then he comes out
of his reverie
and awakens
to the
painful reality
that she is never
going to be in
that dress again.

And torrents of tears
fall from his eyes.

Bob Boyd

You are old,
pushing 80.
You are alone
without love
and you think
you’d like to
find a woman
to cherish and
love.

But try as much
as you will
to hide the fact
the sword of
Democoles
hangs over any
old couples love
you could find,
even if you
could find any
love, pushing 80,

You know that
death will be
racing toward
both of you
with misery
on its heels
for one of you.

Bob Boyd