Category: Poems

My friend, Don, fed up with women,
chose a life size doll instead of a real woman
at an exorbitant cost of $3,000.

I said that’s a high price tag for a doll.
Don said, “It’s a bargain compared to how
much money I’ve blown on women.”

I let the conversation go at that,
but wondered if Don had lost his mind,
and, besides, I wondered what would
he and the doll he called Alma talk about?

I got the answer a week later when I
visited Don and Alma, and Don spoke to
her as if she was carrying on a conversation
with him.

A year later, Don got really crazy and said
Alma had died of cancer and he had buried
her in his backyard.

Two weeks later, Don showed up at my apartment
with a crazed look in his eyes.

“Alma’s haunting me!” he said.

I said, “Maybe you should see a shrink.”

Offended, Don stomped out of my apartment
and yelled he needed an exorcist and not a shrink.

Days later, worried about Don, I visited him at his
house and found him dead in his backyard with
a resurrected, dirt covered Alma on top of him.

The police said he died of a massive heart attack,
and joked about the doll, which I absconded with,
sprayed holy water on, and burned to ashes just in case.

Bob Boyd

I remember her last resigned gasp,
The awful rattling in her throat
The end of her, the end of everything,
Without her, I wanted to die too.
For ten years I’ve had endless laments
Never ceasing in my love for her,
Never loving another woman,
True to her as if she never died.
Now with a deadly stage 4 cancer
My diseased life coming to an end
I hear a voice, see a pretty face
My Love smiling and waiting for me.

Bob Boyd

Her beauty captivated him.
Never saw a woman as beautiful as her.

Her face and body perfect,
eyes heavenly blue.

But he failed to take the time to
know her beyond the superficial.

Fell in love with her immediately,
married her too soon.

Now he’s in a marriage from hell
with a woman impossible to live with

who is planning to ruin his reputation
and his life

when she tells all in court with some
lies thrown in and ruins him financially too.

Bob Boyd

Important in his day
a star among stars,
fame that would last
forever.

Hailed as the greatest
actor of all times. Never
any as famous as him.
Known all over the world
even in outer Mongolia.

Today nobody’s heard
of him, his fame washed
away in the tides of time.

Bob Boyd

It was as if evil had been implanted in him from birth,
and he never had a chance to be good.

Even his face had an evil look that only grew worse
as he became older.

When he was a child of six, he began kidnapped
dogs and cats in his neighborhood, torturing and killing them.

At age sixteen, he began his kills, and got away with them
until age 27, when the police finally were on to him.

When they appeared at his house, he resisted arrest
and had a shootout with the police

whereupon he walked into a storm bullets and committed
death by cop with his hellborn infamy destroyed forever.

Bob Boyd

25 and about finding the truth.
25 and about higher
states of consciousness.
25 and a full blown seeker,
I get initiated into a
meditation method
in a room in Cambridge, Mass
not far from Radcliffe
and Harvard U.

An elaborate ceremony,
an altar and incense burning,
the initiator a woman chanting.
I get a sacred Hindu mantra.
I begin to mentally repeat it

A minute later, I hear a
soft snapping sound in the
center of my forehead,
maybe where the third eye
is said to be, maybe not.

My consciousness expands
and its flooded with
indescribable bliss
beyond anything
I’d ever imagined.

I walk out of the
meditation room high and
feeling like a Hindu monk
in a flowing robe, feeling like
I’d come home, feeling like
I’d been a Hindu monk
in a former life.

Bob Boyd

A friend and I driving around in his father’s car, both of us sixteen with raging hormones.
A hot, voluptuous girl our age thumbs a ride. My friend gives her a lift.

She gets in the car in the front seat next to me, her perfume exhilarating. She rubs my leg and calls me chicken.

But I was unaffected, not even tempted to react to her challenge despite her beautiful face and voluptuous body.

She was sloppy drunk, and a woman drunk has always been a turn off to me.

Plus, it just wouldn’t have been right to take advantage of her in that vulnerable condition.

Though a troubled kid, I had some principles, and in some cases a solid sense of right and wrong.

But if I’d met her at a dance sober and looking as good as she did, I would have been enamored and wanting to get to know her.

Surprisingly, when we let her off at her destination, she thanked me for not taking advantage of her.

That was one of the few times I shined like a star in my wayward, wrong side of the tracks, troubled youth.

I remember it and write about it because of the rarity of me doing anything right and memorable when I was a teenage greaser, a loser and a rebel, though never a bully or in trouble with the Law.

Bob Boyd

As I became fascinating with dragons, I somehow got the idea of how cool it would look having a real life picture of a Celtic woman in a blue medieval dress hugging a large, subdued giant dragon.

I saw this as a reversal of the old legend of a princess imprisoned in a castle by an evil dragon that only a brave knight could save her from.

I saw it as a dragon imprisoned by her magical love and magnetic compassion.
And I liked the idea of that.

I feel there is probably more symbolism to that picture than I can imagine,
perhaps something like a liberating feminine symbol of a woman’s power.

Or maybe a deeper metaphysical meaning beyond my designing intention or comprehension.

Whether a simple or profound meaning, I love how great and realistic that picture looks.

Bob Boyd

I look outside my apartment
and see the leaves on the trees
like never before

and I marvel at how green the
reborn leaves have become
this month of April.

Before I was retired, I never
noticed these wonders of
nature. I was so consumed
with my job, I paid no
attention to them.

Now I see them as though
my senses have become
alive beyond belief,

as though I have new eyes
that have opened to nature’s
seasonal splendors with
greater clarity and sight.

And I see the beautiful blue of the sky
and the greening of the lush grass
that surrounds my apartment.

Now I appreciate the greening
of April like never before.

Bob Boyd

I’ve lived 80 years of life, have lived in many places,
many states and Europe and the Philippines.

I’ve had a reasonably full life with many adventures
and have no need for more earthly adventures.

I see death as the greatest adventure ever.

I see death as a shedding of earthly cares and
a temporary body with it’s vulnerabilities to
aging, disabilities and diseases that one is
rid of when newly born young and fresh
in the afterlife.

And I am in a position with no attachments,
so I can easily let go when death comes.

If I had a girlfriend or a wife, my heart would
break at even the thought of leaving her.
I would not want to let go unless we could
go together.

I’d fight to stay alive with every iota of my
being to stay with her and not leave her
behind while I ascended into what I see as
a greater, wonderous world.

But because I’m so accepting of dying,
and because I feel so incredibly good,
still working out, exercising daily,
as if I were nearly indestructible,
I’ll probably be here for many more years,
more than I want to be.

And as you can never say never, maybe
one day I’ll be blissfully anchored
to this world with a girlfriend or a wife
and unable to let go when death comes.

Or maybe like sometimes happens,
we’d go out together or each would
die within days of the other.

In the meantime, come Death
take me home to what I believe
is my true home.

And though I’m not a fundamentalist
Christian but a devout believer in Christ
in a non-churched mystical fashion,
maybe Jesus will meet me at the doorway
to death and take me to paradise.

Or maybe I’ll merge with the cosmos,
become post life enlightened and live
forever in the eternal bliss consciousness.

Whatever the outcome, I look forward to dying
though not in a suicidal sense.

Bob Boyd

don’t always make good romantic partners
one is content staying home most of the time
the other has to get out all of the time
though some seem to make it work
I read Dolly Parton and her husband did
God bless them I don’t know how
but Dolly must be an exceptional person
to stay faithful with all the temptations
she could have had as an entertainer
I have alway been mostly a homebody
though in my wild youth I was out all the time
when I had a romantic partner I preferred
to stay home most of the time and to
go out occasionally unlike some women
I’d been with who had to get out all the time
with a wife like that I was terribly lonely
and remember an old country song
isn’t it lonely together and eventually
I had to leave her even though she
surprisingly begged me to stay despite the
homebody social butterfly incompatibility.

bob boyd

Consider all these people who go missing
without a clue of what happened to them

except maybe their shoes the only thing
found with no traces, and even search and

rescue dogs can’t pick up a scent of them.

Supposedly their numbers are in the thousands
and no one knows what happened to them.

Not a trace of the vanishings and no logical
explanations for their disappearances.

Speculations vary: portals, aliens, Bigfoot,
Dogman, or something else supernatural
and unknown.

I’ve listened to cases where allegedly people
have experienced bizarre beings that appeared
to them via other dimensions.

For example, something quasi formless that
morphs into bizarre forms and beckons them
while everything gets quiet all around them,
or a form that emits a vibration that
vibrates everything around that a person,
even that person’s keys in his pocket.

As crazy as it sounds and may be, imagine if
beings from other dimensions were instantly
manifesting in this dimension and snatching
these people into those dimensions for
whatever reasons.

A chilling thought indeed. And, in my opinion,
as good a guess as any other explanation.

As for me, I’m open to the theory these
inexplicable 411 missing cases could be
kidnappings by aliens with the ability to
move with ease in and out of dimensions.

But, of course, that could be utter nonsense,
and nobody knows for sure the fate of the 411s.

Bob Boyd

I can’t believe people who go through horrific things in this life were bad people in past lives who are getting their due.

I think if karma is factual it’s more complicated than that. I think there is randomness in the equation.

For example, a while back in the news it was reported a woman in New York was walking through a park and a large tree branch fell on her and killed her.

I see that as randomness and not some karmic payback.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of karma. I don’t like the idea of assigning a person’s bad behavior in a former life to bad karma when they are going through something horrendous like a terminal brain cancer or the loss of their legs.

I do believe in action and reaction in this life. A person commits a crime and usually imprisonment is the reaction, but in my belief that’s not past life or this life bad karma.

But karma is based on belief and speculation, and I choose to believe there’s more than karma involved when it comes to a person’s suffering.

Bob Boyd

Last night I dreamed about bombs
beginning to fall, and braced for
the impending explosions,
but woke up before the bombs fell.

Though a dream, the feeling was
as real as if I were in a country
where bombs were always
about to fall.

I woke up relieved the falling bombs
were only a dream, and wondered
what that dream was really about

or what I’d seen or read about
during the day that might have
manifested in that dream.

Now I’m imagining how horrifying it
must be to live, or have lived, in a country
where bombs are always about to fall.

Bob Boyd

Sitting at my computer in front of a window
with the moonlight coming through,
I find myself thinking about you.

And I’m remembering how nice it was
being with you.

And what a wonderful part of my life those
seven years were.

Though our love ended when you got sick
and didn’t want to burden me

and left despite my forever vow to be there
always for you, I’m okay with our lost love now.

And though alone and over twenty years older,
I’ll go to my grave remembering you
and how much you meant to me.

Bob Boyd