CLYDE BARROW'S SAX - Poem

 CLYDE BARROW’S SAX

(C0pyright 2019, by Dave Kiffer)
Everything is a tool, they say,
Like a gun doesn't do the killing,
It is just a trigger to be pulled
Still, this is what they found in the trunk,
It was about the only thing sans bullet holes,
And now there it was, plain as day, on EBAY
It came with a certificate by the family
Of one of the Texas cops who was there
That humid day in backwoods Louisiana
Seems the pursuers kept everything
After the bodies were hauled away
It was a Ford full of weapons, and this,
A 1928 Buescher C Melody sax
Good condition, some tarnish
Needs new pads like all old horns
Just a few tweaks to make it playable,
According to the EBAY posting,
But would you really make them?
The more you remove, the less
Of the notoriety remains, and a
Normal C Melody sax is worthless
It was never a good horn, stuffy,
Poorly in tune, a novelty mostly
Sold to non-musicians back in the day
Which is how we would think
Of Clyde Barrow, an amateur in most
Ways, except robbing and killing
But this was his saxophone
His release, his chance to create
Something instead of chaos
His survivors said he played it
Even when he was on the run
Bonnie was said to favor the sound
There was sheet music in the trunk
Thirty popular tunes of the day
Perhaps Bonnie’s favorite song
The bidding started at somewhere
North of twelve thousand, five hundred
It was way out of my range
And I was traveling, so I missed
How it all turned out, how much
Someone valued the curiosity
Of having such an infamous thing
Was worth, like pocketing Booth’s
Bloody little brown Derringer
Some would blanch at owning
Such an ill-connected thing
As if it had a swastika on its bell
Others would treasure its history
Its sidelong glance of opprobrium
Its good connection to something bad
But it was just a sum of silver plated parts
Nothing unlike more than a million other horns
That somehow found their long way
From Elkhardt into the jet stream
And scattered like a million random notes
Into the many corners of the four winds

Where it likely remains to this day
In its case, in a closet, untouched
Since Clyde Barrow brought it to life

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