Blue and red fill the room,
No sirens just invasive light,
No warning just a silent night.
Oh how I made this house my home,
Oh how a man can disown…
His wife and children,
Wanted his head beaten in.
Knock once, twice, no need for a third,
The man they were looking for heard…
Long before a uniform encroached on our steps,
Heard the denial in his recruited murderer’s breathes.
“I’ve been looking at your wife immodestly, and whistling as she walks,
I’ve called her honey, and baby, yet she refuses to talk.
But even if she doesn’t want me; I will always want her,
So go ahead, here’s the bat and here’s my skull, give it a whirl.”
“Sir, Xenia PD, instruct your children to remain inside”
Murder could not substitute suicide.
Off went our father, innocent then, but now I know why.
Mother came onto the stage calmer than I,
Yet we both were starving from lack of answers,
Our patriarch in the hospital, yet no reason given,
We had to investigate for our own penance.
The neighbor, a state trooper, our first stop,
I saw him collide onto the scene along with my father’s captors.
In civilian garb, and off duty, he made a risky decision and gave us near full disclosure.
A veteran of our nation’s recent battles, he recalled my father as more worrisome in demeanor than any post-traumatic soldier.
Father came to him shaking in visible fear, bleeding out sweat of danger,
The civil servant had no choice but to search him.
Patting him down and instructing him to lay his front porch,
My father poured out his sins to a perfect stranger.
“A man of God” the trooper identified him correctly enough,
Concluding that a man done with living still could not take his life when his Book condones it.
Either a coward or a good Christian,
Now I don’t want to be either.
Recounting the whole plan to this trooper, my father admitted to premediated murder,
Not the type that sends you to jail or even gives you an excuse to find a lawyer.
This was the dirty scheme to rope another woman’s husband into a lustful fit of vengeance.
Not lacking diligence, he increased his compliments and errant looks on every evening walk towards a woman not his,
Soon the woman sacrificed her evening gardening for unnecessary housework; her plants then withered much like my father’s attempts a faux-seduction.
He banked on her spreading vile rumors to her husband,
He hoped his winks signaled danger,
He knew that she wasn’t biting, yet she wasn’t the one swinging…
His son’s first little league bat that took months to choose,
For his son was just as indecisive as he,
Yet he decided this was as good of a murder weapon as any.
The molested wife’s husband in the drive, hands clutched to his tools, a steaming engine beneath him,
The suicidal, former baseball coach and father approaches, his own tool in hand,
Only there are no grounders to be distributed today, only one “Swing Away.”