Ever feel like you should be on trial for something?
With what we get away with over our life’s course,
do you ever wonder if you’d been caught sometime,
how it might have ended if you had to pay for your crime?
I pray the best for you, hope it’s only small stuff,
fine as the silk of time’s sand run between
your fingers as you pull them off here and there.
Take this, break that, punch someone,
run a red stoplight but don’t kill anyone.
Hmmm, anyone ever get away with murder?
Maybe someone who sees this has?
Roughly 45 percent of murders go unsolved.
That person you’re sitting next to in a bar,
sipping marguerita’s like he’s a bottomless dark well,
might have a juicy tale of homicide to tell.
The bus driver who keeps glancing at you in the rearview,
if he took you out, might you be his number one or two?
Your quiet neighbor, a rear widow widower undetected?
Everyone you jostled with today on the street or subway?
If I’d committed a murder and got away with it,
side-stepping the fine investigative minds worldwide, Hah!
I once dreamed, what with all my recent trips,
traveling as often as I can when I’m not confined,
what would the chances be, were I a paid assassin,
of getting away under the cover of a globe-trotting retiree?
But horrors, if I were caught for sloppy preparation or execution,
stood up obviously guilty before a jury of my peers . . .
No, of course, I’d rather stand with the 45 of 100,
take out all those bad guys with the time I have left.
So I woke up leaning against the airplane widow
smiling at my successes before I dreamt of being tried.
Lanning Lee 