Showering daily always seems the best advice
for clean, older-free skin,

but, to my surprise, I learned once or twice weekly
is best for thinning, aging skin after age 70.

What about body odor, you might ask, wouldn’t
you stink?

Not if you washed key areas, 3 in number,
with a wash cloth or wipes daily.

And, of course, used deodorant daily
as well.

Don’t take my word for it; do your own
research like I did and see for yourself.

I first learned this from an 80 year old lady in a
YouTube video.

Her daughter gave her a hug one day and
said she smelled despite bathing daily.

Her doctor told her she was bathing too much
which caused the odor.

The doctor’s prescripscrption, bath once or
twice weekly and of course use deodorant.

Bob Boyd

She was from the Philippines
uncommonly beautiful
spoke excellent English
funny and gregarious
a nice person too
but where she lived
was steeped in superstition
and she was duped by it
she believed a nearby island
was filled with evil witches
she believed
in vampires as well
fortunately I was able to
expunge the superstitions
from her once gullible mind
and free her of those
illusionary fears.

Bob Boyd

In her youth she
was the life of the party
said witty things
made people laugh
invited to all the gatherings
always the most fun

now she’s an old woman
her heyday past
her friends gone
she lives alone
in a tiny apartment
barely getting by
often having a cry
just waiting to die

Bob Boyd

As I’m rambling through the supermarket
about to leave

she suddenly appears with a smile
and a cheery hello

I’m not romantically interested in her
but her joyful greeting

makes me feel wonderful just the same.

Bob Boyd

A stink bug lives only 6–8 months.
I wonder if those 6–8 months
are like a human’s 60–90 years.
That is, if stink bugs even have
a sense of time passing.

They must have a sense of
their bodies aging
from the wreckage of
growing older.

What I’d like to know for sure
is where stink bugs go
when they die.

It’s easy to assume there’s
no afterlife for them,
just as it’s easy to assume

there’s an afterlife for humans,
but that’s all conjecture;
nobody knows for sure.

Silly as it may seem to you,
my hope is an afterlife
awaits not only insects
but all lifeforms.

Bob Boyd

Age has decimated him,
a powerful man in his youth,
fearless and a hero in wars.

Now he stumbles around,
weak and muttering,
his power and bravery
gone,

his heroic days barely
remembered, his life
fading away.

Bob Boyd

Every so often, I find a stink bug struggling to stay alive
in my ten-gallon aquarium.

Luckily for these stink bugs, I’ve always been able to
save them.

Fortunately for these stink bugs, they’ve never had their legs
bitten off by any of the fish in my aquarium.

Sometimes I wonder if these stink bugs have death wishes
or if some events in their lives have made them suicidal.

Maybe some of them have been jilted by their significant
others, and they decided to end their miseries in the deep.

Whatever the case, whatever the reasons, I suspect my
ten-gallon aquarium will, like the Golden Gate Bridge,
keep being a location of choice for stink bugs to keep
trying to end their lives.

And I’ll keep scooping them out of the deep.

Bob Boyd

He claimed he had attained cosmic consciousness
and could look into people’s eyes and take them there.

I knew he had had a mental breakdown, a disconnection
from reality, by his erratic speech patterns.

And he spent the rest of the time I knew him in and out
of psychiatric wards in hospitals.

There are or were spiritual adepts in India called masts,
who got so spiritually high when they attained the Oneness

that they could no longer function on the earth plane
and had to be taken care of, though revered.

The prevailing questions are were they mentally ill
or fully enlightened, did they have bona fide

spiritual experiences or counterfeit ones,
or were their mystical experiences a combination of both?

I don’t think anyone can definitely say for sure
in all of these cases.

And maybe in some of these cases what
seemed like breakdowns were breakthroughs.

Bob Boyd

Some descriptions of the afterlife
make it seem like you’ll be somewhere
walking on solid ground.

One could easily conjecture that it’s
souls floating around, probably
blissfully.

No matter how hard I try to visualize it,
I always fall short.

Sometimes I think I could get a breakthrough
but so far not even a peek.

It would be cool if you had a choice
of your afterlife when you passed
through the doorway of death

and were presented with a brochure
of various choices.

I’d opt for a soulmate in a heavenly paradise
on solid ground.

Of course, it could be that the afterlife
is merely everyone dead under solid ground.

Bob Boyd

She was said to be a good, Godly woman.
Her husband was a music director in their church.
He got a mistress. She got 2 bullets to the head.
He’s arrested for murder. She is dead.
The evidence is overwhelming, looks like prison for him.
And if his mistress was involved in the murder of his wife,
she will turn on him and he on her in court, each
trying to save their own skin, the romance over.
As a Christian, he probably believes in hell,
but might think he can get a pass from Jesus
with some real or fake prayers for repentence.
Were I Jesus, I wouldn’t let him off the hook
in a hell he would cook.

Bob Boyd