The Crimestopper Poem by Nancy Ames

(The setting is a farmhouse kitchen in a remote location in North America, and a middle-aged rancher is on the phone to the cops.)

'Concentration-camper look-alike
and riding on a mountain-bike
and he wears a ragged uniform,
arrived here just before the storm.

He appeared a little frightening
in the flashes of the lightning,
but unfamiliar otherwise,
with water dripping from his eyes.

Well, it wasn't very long before
he was walking through our open door;
he's not much more than skin and bones
and spoke to us in monotones.

He opened up his coat to show
and tell us something but, you know,
sounding like those language lessons,
'I do not carry any weapons.'

He was no more solid than a ghost
and, tell me, how was I supposed
to know he's wanted by the law?
I'm just describing what I saw.

He looked like he was really dying
although his eyes were death-defying;
his skin was white, his hair was gray,
he told us he had come to stay.

Although he seemed intelligent,
he had a funny foreign accent
and he got paranoid and rude
when we tried to give him food.

So I offered him a cigarette;
his answer was the strangest yet,
insisted we were wasting matches
and showed us his barbed-wire scratches.

When he took down a rifle off the wall,
I noticed he was very tall...
he turned to us and smiled and said,
'And now I need to go to bed.'

We didn't get much sleep last night;
we didn't dare turn off the light
and every sound was like a warning,
but somehow in the early morning...

The guy was up and gone again,
and not a track in all this rain;
we thought we'd give you boys a call
and help you capture this screwball.'