I Met Charlie Starkweather Once

I was asleep at midnight
when I heard a sound come from outside.
I went to check what it was, out
the screen door, through the yard on the edge
of thirty acres of corn and under the country stars.
There was a foreign car by the barn and a man

fussing with the lock. I said, “Hey man!”
and I noticed a woman with hair like midnight
sitting in the car with a face as young as a star.
She creaked open the car door and stepped outside.
She went and sat on the hood’s edge.
The man, from his coat, pulled a sawed-off .410 out.

There was nothing left to figure out,
I’d heard on the radio about the man,
come from Lincoln, Nebraska, near the edge
of town, where the darkness is blacker than midnight,
who killed three innocent people just outside
the city with only the stars

as a witness. All those stars
above me yelled my name, and out
into the cornfield I ran like a stranger outside
my own house. I could hear the man
rustling through the ears yelling, “Midnight
is a good time to die old man, you’re on the edge

of your life! The edge!”
I prayed for clouds to cover the stars
but none came and the toll of midnight
rushed up on me, I was out
of time. In a manner of minutes the man
stumbled upon me, as I am old and outside

I am no match for youth. My soul was outside
my skin as the man took the edge
of his gun, stood over me, another human
like him and it felt like the weight of the stars
fell on me, pushed the life and blood out
of my body, made me howl into night.

Just outside my farmhouse, under the Wyoming stars
by the edge of the cornfield, my body lay bloodied and out
of life as the man took off down the dirt road, in the shadow of midnight.

Road Trip Sonnet for Katrina

It was mid-September when we got back
from traveling around the south.
I sat and looked at the photographs
of the victims with an open mouth.
They were stranded on the roof,
they were packed without food and water,
they were forced by feds to move,
Betsy’s grown up sons and daughters.
We had just been through New Orleans
only three short weeks before.
Listenin’ to jazz on bourbon
with no idea what was in store.
And we drove up the side of the Rockies,
as Katrina broke through those Levees.