Some people criticized Tesla for obsessing over pigeons.
I don’t have a problem with that.

While living in New York, he spent many hours
feeding pigeons in a park.

If I’d lived in New York, I would have liked to have
fed them too.

Sometimes he took injured pigeons home to help them
heal and get well.

I find that praiseworthy and admire Tesla for caring
enough for pigeons to do that.

Supposedly, he said he fell in love with a white pigeon,
like a man falls in love with a woman.

And when she died, a bright white light shone from her
eyes brighter than any light he had generate with machinery.

Tesla was depressed and distraught when she died,
told friends he felt like his life’s work was finished.

I don’t have a problem with any of that, maybe he had a mystical
connection with that pigeon beyond human comprehension.

Even if what I wrote is just bunk, at least his obsession wasn’t
hurting anybody, nor himself and his fame.

Bob Boyd

Clouds wandered in azure skies
Rivers poured through towns and glens
Flowers swayed in windswept fields
Deer and elk frockled in fall forests
But in a time forgotten cemetery
Hidden among quiet oak trees
Defaced and abandoned
Not a soul stirred

Bob Boyd

After you left me
despite all I did for you and
your son

helping pay for his treatments
for his hydrocephalus
and tragically for his funeral

and bringing you to America
for a chance at a better life
than the poverty you grew
up in
and much more –

I hated you for two years,
even though I was glad you
were gone

Then one day
like the sun shining
through the dark clouds
of a ceasing storm

my hatred ceased for you
and I got on with my life freed
from the consuming turmoil
of the hate
that was buried in my heart

The artist Matisse had a young and beautiful assistant,
Lydia Delectorskaya.

She was hired to help him when his wife got sick to
run his art studio and be a nurse to his wife.

Lydia respected and admired Matisse because unlike other
artists, he never tried to seduce her after she became his model.

But Matisse’s wife Amelie grew jealous of Lydia, not because
she thought she was sleeping with Matisse.

She was jealous of how Lydia was doing all the things she
used to do for Matisse running his art studio.

She told Matisse it was her or Lydia, and Matisse told Lydia
she had to leave.

Distraught and feeling like she had lost her purpose in life,
Lydia tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the chest.

Miraculously, she lived. The bullet hit a bone in her chest,
which saved her from dying.

Not long after that, Amelie left Matisse, and he asked Lydia
to come back and work for him again.

Though Matisse and Lydia never became lovers, she worked
for him till the day he died, running everything for him.

After he died, she wrote two favorable books about her
experiences with him and his work:

Against the Winds and Storms (1996) Apparent Ease (1998),
and she spent the rest of her life working on his heritage.

Bob Boyd

She plays with a Ouija Board one day,
thinking it’s just a harmless game.
That night she wakes up and sees a hag spirit
next to her bed looking at her ominously.
The nightmarish scene repeats night after night,
and eventually she gets drained and sick.
The hag spirit, really a demon, keeps draining
her life force till she feels like she is dying.
A woman with knowledge of dark things and
how to exorcize them is called in.
She uses sage and sea salt and mysterious chants
and prayers in the bedroom and around the girl.
A lightness is felt in the dark room, and the woman
knows she’s rid it and the girl of the hag demon.
Thereafter the girl regains her good health and
is never tormented by the hag demon again.

Bob Boyd

The separation is painful; her soldier husband is
somewhere on the front lines.

Every day is a lament, and she hasn’t heard from
him in weeks.

She sees flocks of birds returning now that it’s spring,
but still no correspondence from her husband.

In a dream she sees him bloodied and unconscious,
and when an officer knocks on her front door the next day,

before she opens the door, tears fall down her face, and
she knows her husband has died.

Bob Boyd

I’ve become excited about art and
the bios of male and female artists.
I never cared about art before,
but now I’m in love with it.
And even though I’m an old man,
I was thinking how fun and
educational it would be to have
an artist, hobbyist or professional,
as a girlfriend or a wife. And how
I’d love to see her paintings and
talk about art all the time with her.

Bob Boyd

The artist Henri Matisse had a nice, supportive wife.
She married him when he was near penniless.
She didn’t care about the money. She cared about
his awesome artistic ability and felt he should pursue it.
She stayed with him through lean times and even
opened up a hat shop to help with finances.
But many years later she left him; it’s rumored because
he was involved with another woman.
If that was the case, what a shame that he lost such
a good and supportive wife because of it.

Bob Boyd

When he first saw here, he was so blown away
by her looks that he told her he felt love at first sight for her.

She said, “But you don’t know me.”

And mercy me, she was so right. Six of her last boyfriends and husbands disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances.

He didn’t know this, so he went out with her anyway, and a year
later, he hadn’t disappeared or died.

But she had died. Supposedly she jumped out of a ten story window
while on her honeymoon with him.

Maybe it was a case of serial killers in love, a match made in hell,
and they both had the same plan, except his worked out well.

Bob Boyd

Billions of people on the planet.
If they have spirits when they die,
I wonder where in the afterlife
there will there be room enough
for billions of them and the trillions
of them already there.

Do you ever think about stuff like
that or don’t you care?

To speculate further, maybe there
is a set number, and that number
just gets repurposed as newbies
recycled back to this planet.

And if those spirits get good
enough and behave well enough,
maybe they get off the repurposed
cycle and kind of evaporate into
infinity. And as a reward, they
stay permanently blissed out.

Bob Boyd