Category: Poems

Editing genes in embryos
Inserting DNA
in sperms, and eggs
a controversial process
supposedly banned
but not quite
seems some are
doing or trying it
maybe eugenics
at its worst
designer babies
for the rich
to me, something
seems terribly
wrong with this
like scientists
acting like gods
creating unnatural
gene tweaked babies.

Bob Boyd

How I love the the sweet
sound of a woman’s voice
but better than her voice
is the sound of her laughter.

Bob Boyd

I’m remembering your kisses under a summer’s sun
when I was just seventeen years old and so in love with you
few things in my life ever compared to those kisses
but thinking back, those kisses were bittersweet
when I think about how you cheated on me
and tears fell from my eyes under a desolate winter’s sun.

Bob Boyd

Trying to wake the hell up
night turned into early day
woke me up from a dream
with a nice young woman
showed her a curved knife
somebody had given me
don’t know who or why
but the knife was sharp
the talk with the woman
was exceptionally pleasant
woke up remembering how
nice it can be just talking
with an agreeable woman
almost made me want to
seek the company of one
until I regained my senses.

Bob Boyd

Jack and Jill hiked up a hill
Only one came down.
411 or something more wicked?
Jack claimed Jill disappeared,
Turned around and she was gone.
Police suspicious, searched everywhere
But never found Jill.
Everybody believed Jack
Murdered Jill –
They were having trouble
In their relationship.
Miraculously, a week later
Jill came down from the mountain
Babbling about aliens abducting her.

Bob Boyd

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner of a grocery store
eating a plum pie he ripped off from the bakery.
When he put in his thumb and pulled out a plum
and claimed he was a good boy,
Store Security caught the theft on a store security camera.
They hauled that bad boy, a 21-year-old repeat offender,
off to the pokey where he spent 30 days and then more
for stealing an inmate’s pumpkin pie.

When he was sprung from the pokey, he went back to
the grocery stores and stole six more pies
and had to appear before a judge in court.

Because the judge thought Jack Horner’s pie kleptomania was nuts,
instead of putting him back in the pokey, he sentenced him
to immediate counseling.

A year later Jack Honer was cured of pie stealing obsession.
And this might be only coincidental, but the grocery store
where Jack Honer stole all his pies from, now can’t
account for all the missing cookies.

Bob Boyd

“Georgy Porgy, pudding pie,
kissed the girls and made them cry.”

Georgy Porgy continued kissing girls
violating them with unwanted kisses
from childhood until an arrestable adult

became known as the neighborhood
masher, and all the girls avoided him
because of his non-consensual kisses

when he reached the legal age of 18
he non-consensually kissed a legal aide
she reported him to the police and Georgy
Porgy got arrested and fined 2,000 dollars

now Georgy Porgy sits in a coroner with
Jack Horner eating stolen Christmas pies
instead of stealing expensive kisses.

Bob Boyd

A standout athlete
a bodybuilder too
worked out like a
work horse

got built like one too
big and brawny
18 inch guns
curling 175 pounds

phenomenal physique
chemically enhanced
roids and whatever

a bloated big guy in
a bar probably drunk
called him a pussy

he knew he should
have ignored the guy
but he wanted to test
his enhanced muscle
power in a fight

knocked the guy out
with a single punch
got elated with the
easy win

now Charles Meeks
lies under a tombstone
in a grassy cemetery
knocked out a mafioso’s
son.

Bob Boyd

Michael met her in a dream
heartbreakingly beautiful
a body unimaginably perfect
telepathic I love yous
caresses he could feel
all over his etheric body
better than caresses
on his physical body
the perfect astral lover
his soulmate from beyond

he told his close friend James
about his new astral lover
James, lonely single man
envied Michael and wished
he had an astral lover too

a week later, Michael died
spontaneous combustion
the coroner said

now Michael’s ex is visiting
James in dreams, and James
thinks he’s lucked out
unknown to him he’ll be
scorched to dead too

his new perfect girlfriend
a demonic killer succubus.

Bob Boyd

Duncan goes to work
pounds holes in metal
on an assembly line
in a factory all day
never gets bored
best worker ever
replaced a human
named fast Eddy
who wasn’t fast
enough and cost
too much

now fast Eddy has
slowed down on
the unemployment
line

and his prospects
for another job
aren’t looking good
he’s flesh and bones
not the right type to
compete with the
robots at his old
job at the factory
or near anywhere
else these robot
dominated days.

Bob Boyd

I watch a lot of true crime shows
often good people get murdered
in deadly marriages

for example

a good guy who’s an upstanding citizen
and a Sunday School teacher
is married to a woman who is also
a member of the church and
volunteers for it

it seemed they have a loving marriage
together for years with two kids

the minister of the church, though married,
had a roving eye for women
behind his preaching and righteousness,
he’s chronically promiscuous

he eventually woos and beds the good guy’s
Christian wife, who seemed too proper
too good a wife for such unholy shenanigans

the good guy husband suspected the affair
but appeared to be talked out of his suspicions
by his wife and her minister paramour

not long after that, the good guy is dead,
shot in the head
the minister was the shooter,
the wife an accomplice, in on the plan
maybe the architect of it
told the minister she wished her husband was dead

insurance was the prize the wife wanted to win

but to her shock and outrage, the good guy
perhaps knowing for sure
his wife was cheating on him
changed his beneficiary to his kids instead
of her

the wife and the minister had been seeing each other
for ten years behind the good guy husband’s back
now they’re broken up and only seeing the bars
on their prison cells.

Bob Boyd

Oh how I wanted to move to Thailand
not for the women in the streets
outside the bars
or the drinking and the wild partying

not to be a sex tourist
far from those empty, carnal pleasures
except for the pleasures of
a one and only true love
and many are the exotically
beautiful Thai women

though not a Buddhist, I wanted to see
the Buddhist temples
and the Buddhist monks
and at that time I was interested in
Mauy Thai, would have loved to
have attended the fights
maybe I would have bought a
phra kruang amulet

never got there, went to the Philippines
instead
a beautiful Filipina changed my mind.

Bob Boyd

Age of Aquarius
yours truly was there
didn’t drop acid or trip out
on LSD or space out on drugs

never got to San Francisco
to meet the “gentle people there
with flowers in their hair”
but oh how I loved that song and still do

Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury
Jimi Hendricks, The Doors
California dreaming
peace and love
good vibes in the cosmic air

psychedelic music playing
in the background
free spirits everywhere
some freaking out
some finding themselves

loved the hopeful, Utopian visions
and the looks of the hippy women
never had one for a girlfriend
more’s the pity – maybe

loved the sixties vibe
but except for many
spiritual experiences
one with the
forever transformative
white light
bright like the sun,
and deep into Eastern Spirituality
I was mostly a straight arrow

didn’t curate the look, the beads
the freak flag (real long hair)

now the hippies are mostly gone
a few remnants still hanging on
hopelessly clinging
to the forsaken dream

neo hippies scattered here and there
but it’s just not the same
it seems superficial and unreal
the promise of peace and love
just isn’t there

the 60s Age of Aquarius has died out
Haight-Ashbury is no longer a hippie haven
and nobody’s California dreaming anymore.

Bob Boyd

From the day we are born …
we are all destined to become
discarnate entities, incorporeal spirits

at least that’s what
NDE accounts, my beliefs
and spiritual experiences
suggest to me

a human today
like a ghost tomorrow

will some of us
hang around
and haunt a particular place

or will we all go to the Light
or have what the Hindus
call a maha samadhi

and become one with the universe
living in the Sat Chit Ananda
the eternal bliss consciousness?

or, maybe we won’t get beyond the grave
the funeral pyre or the cremation oven

and be obliterated into nothingness

I could handle that and so could you
there wouldn’t be
any you’s or me’s
to fret and worry about it.

Bob Boyd

Human, brainless bodies manufactured
for spare parts for humans

called bodyoids

might be coming down the pike
developed from stem cells

replacement organs
for medical patients who need them
maybe an arm or a leg too

human bodies alive but brain dead
living breathing

but nobody home
in terms of sentience
and consciousness

I don’t know about you
but farming brainless, soulless human bodies
sounds Frankenstein ghoulish to me.

Bob Boyd