On May 4th, the poems of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow will be auctioned off by Heritage Auctions in Dallas. The notorious gangster couple wrote poems during their two-year crime spree from 1932-1934 that included robbing banks, gas stations and shops and killing people along the way. They were eventually ambushed by the police in Louisiana and died in the shootout. The poems were written in a 1933 daily planner notebook that has been in the possession of Clyde Barrows’ family all these decades. Bonnie Parker was particularly prolific. Her poems are long sequences of rhyming stanzas that pull from the Wild West ballad tradition.
You've read the story of Jesse James
Of how he lived and died;
If you're still in need
Of something to read,
Here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
She likens their fugitive life to that of Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Long before Michael Ondaatje wrote The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Bonnie Parker imagined him in poetry, in a chance encounter with Clyde in her poem, “Outlaws—Billy the Kid and Clyde Barrow”:
Billy rode on a pinto horse
Billy the Kid I mean
And he met Clyde Barrow riding
In a little gray machine
Billy drew his bridle rein
And Barrow stopped his car
And the dead man talked to the living man
Under the morning star
Billy said to the Barrow boy
Is this the way you ride
In a car that does its ninety per
Machine guns at each side?
I only had my pinto horse
And my six-gun tried and true
I could shoot but they got me
And someday they will get you!
Bonnie also used her poems at times to set the record straight when they were falsely accused:
If a policeman is killed in Dallas,
And they have no clue or guide;
If they can't find a fiend,
They just wipe their slate clean
And hand it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There's two crimes committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow mob;
They had no hand
In the kidnap demand,
Nor the Kansas City depot job.
While Bonnie and Clyde were glamorized in life and since through film and literature, their poetry reveals that life on the run was far from easy. Clyde (with misspellings) describes:
As we travel down the highway
never knowing where it will end.
Never very much money
and not even a friend
We donte want to hurt annyone
but we have to steal to eat
and if its a shootout to live
then thats the way it will have to bee.
The outlaw couple knows that they are doomed and use their poems to express their fatalism. Their impending death is presented in their poems without bravado or fear, but an understanding that this will ultimately be their end:
Some day they'll go down together;
And they'll bury them side by side;
To few it'll be grief
To the law a relief
But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
~From “Outlaws: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” by Bonnie Parker.
For Bonnie, poetry was a hobby. She had written poetry previously and even had a couple poems published. However, one wonders if the poems written in the 1933 notebook were written for posterity. If so, Bonnie and Clyde would be pleased and surprised that 84 years later, their verse would be auctioned off and read around the world on something called the Internet!