Category: Poems

I came home from WWII battered
Dehumanized and shell shocked
The Army made a monster out of me
I killed at least three score men
And I wanted to kill many more
After the blood lust cooled down
I had guilt for the three score
One was just a Japanese kid
No more than sixteenth that
I shot point blank in the head
The horror on his face still
Haunts me even though
In that war it was me or him
My highschool sweetheart wife
Left me a year after I got out
I understood her right reasons
I was no longer the kid she knew
I was too much trouble and pain
I was always at bars never home
And I’d become a psych case
With a battle wounded brain
My life went to such pieces
After she left that even
The VA couldn’t put all
The fragmented pieces
Back together again
Just like Humpty Dumpty
Though he wasn’t broken in a war
I lived and died a tormented life
Of drunkenness and strife
And I’m buried in Cheltenham
Cemetery and nobody ever
Came to pay their respects

Bob Boyd

My mind, detonating from all your complaints
Your criticisms like slung arrows in my heart
Became too burdensome, too much to bear
You didn’t get that, putting me down your MO
I often wished you could have seen yourself
In a movie or on tv with clear objectivity
To see unfiltered what you were doing to me
And you didn’t know me like you assumed
I was not like the others who suffered abuse
I was the indomitable one who walked out of you

Bob Boyd

Her Dog

I liked your dog better than you
Your dog always loved me wholeheartedly
You loved me half heartedly most of the time
Your dog was always excited to see me
You lost that excitement six months in
Your dog never told me a single lie
You lied to me too many times
Your guileless dog had no deceit in him
You deceived me one time too many
I wasn’t sad when you left me
At least you did one good thing
By leaving me your dog
Who saw through you
Long before I did

Bob Boyd

When I saw you for the first time at a health fair
You looked so beautiful and so angelic.
When I saw you after that it at other health fairs
I was blown away by your incomparable beauty
And imagined it would be amazing being with you.
But I was so awed by your eyes, your hair, your looks
That I found it hard to say even a word to you.
I felt bad about my unease, my stilled tongue.
Then one day when I met you and we began to talk.
I saw you possessed even greater beauty within.
I was happy we got along so wonderfully well
And despite my enhanced, hidden attraction
I was happy for you, being married and having a family
And still looking so beautiful and so angelic.

Bob Boyd

I never knew you had those feelings for me
You hid them so well
I had them too but never told you
You were with another
Now I’m thinking about what we missed
And feeling so forsaken

Bob Boyd

Hearts questing
Loves elusive
Impermanence
Passions passing
Wheels turning
Round and round
Life after life
Living dying
Questing hearts
Green grass
Cold earth
Dead

Bob Boyd

He said he loved Mary
She said I love you too
The conquest won
The game done
He moved on

Her sister said I love you
He said I love you too
She moved on
Revenge sweet
For his deceit

Bob Boyd

My rasbora fish swim merrily in their ten gallon home.
I sit at my computer glancing at them and wondering
Where they go when they die in their watery graves?
Does it all end there, or do they evolve after death?
Do they reincarnate into a higher species?
Or do they leave their fish bodies and go to
A rasbora fish heaven and spend an eternity
In some blissed out fish friendly Divine dimension.
Then, suddenly, I have an epiphany and miraculously
I see in one of many fabulous past lives
I, a human at a computer, was a rasbora!
Okay, you’re right. I’m just kidding
But not about wondering what is a
Rasbora’s after death fate.

Bob Boyd

My wife told me her newfound guru was God in flesh
And could grant his followers enlightenment in a lifetime.
I told her that was nonsense. He is just a cult leader.
We argued about if for a stressful, ruinous week
Until she said she she was leaving me
And going to California to be with her guru.
I said fine, but you are making a big mistake.
She said she felt sorry for me, a lost soul,
Who wasn’t evolved enough to see the truth.
I let that go as she packed and stomped
Out of my life and our ten year marriage.

A year later I saw in the news that
All the guru’s followers killed themselves
By walking into what the guru called
The Agni fires of liberation to become
Illuminated demi gods in the heavens.
The guru, however, didn’t take the walk
He vanished with an untold amount
Of the followers’ generous donations.
To my grateful surprise, my wife
Escaped the cult before the suicides
And came back to me. Maybe my
Desperate prayers actually worked.

Bob Boyd

Sometimes in the nighttime hours
When everything is quiet
When the moon shows its face
And the stars light up the sky
I stare at it all in breathtaking awe
And my thoughts turn to beautiful you
I think of how wonderful you were
In the years of our star-crossed love
And I stifle as many tears as the stars
Remembering what happened to you
When that terminal cancer took
You into the darkest night
Beyond the stars
Beyond our love
Beyond this life

Bob Boyd

You were the first women to bring me flowers
The culture I came out would have labeled me a fem
For accepting flowers like a man turned weak and girly
Because I was light years beyond that unruly world
That nearly ended my young and troubled life
I was so pleased by your beautiful offering of love

Bob Boyd

we heard them on the radios
saw them on MTV videos
some were disparaged
as one hit wonders
but few can ever
achieve that one hit
others failed to live
fast and die young
a few still sing
their glory day hits
but now decades later
those once immortal
rock gods are dying
like the rest of us mortals
and I hate to see the end
of those great, epic days

Bob Boyd

You left me on a half moon night
Appropriate given your half truths
You said we’d be together forever
Forever in your world must have
Equaled a mere unlucky seven years
No wonder we didn’t get a fuller moon
And had to settle for the half slice
If I had been a full mooned werewolf then
I wouldn’t have hunt you down and killed you
Even in beastial state I couldn’t have done it
As if the moon became halved and
Took the hate and the fury out of me
And by the next half moon, so bright
I was irrevocably over you

Bob Boyd

Lying in bed sensing the end
Life ebbing out of me,
Body already like a corpse,
Breathing deep and shallow
Then Fast and slow.
I become less aware of me,
Conscious and unconscious.
Saliva building up in the back of my throat,
I feel the beginning of the rattling coming.
White light flashes in my mind
Angels coming? No way for unworthy me.
Angels fly far away, gone.
No eternal redemption for me?
Can’t barely hear my heart beating,
Becoming deathly faint.
Struggling for breath,
Drowning in death.
As if suddenly suicidal,
I succumb:
10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
LIGHTS OUT.

Bob Boyd

I saw her in the grocery store in my perceptive, peripheral vision.
She was taking a long hungry look at me, which I liked.

When she looked away, I took more than a cursory look, sensed a possible thing.
Slightly past middle age, pretty in a blue dress, golden locks, a shade of gray.

Pushed my grocery store cart a respectful distance behind her, eyeballing her.
She began to morph into a Venus in front me, a goddess, a grocery store lights dream.

I spied a smiling Cupid lurking in the flower section drawing back his bow.
I thought maybe the gods of love have brought Venus to me, true love at last.

My Venus poked through the vegetables, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, rutabagas.
It was all so grand until she got to the onions and put two bags full into her cart.

Cupid frowned, fluttered his wings, put away his bow, and flew out of the flowers and away.
The horrid taste of onions assaulted my taste buds and me and Venus were through.

Bob Boyd