Attempt at a Villanelle

Victims’ Villanelle (First draft – I’ve never done this before, it’s hard! – I used a newspaper article.)

He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries.
The blue-cream Carolina sky just a backdrop to his teaching ho-hums and rural drive.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.

Northbound across the Blue Ridge, while he ties his laces, takes his vitamins, snatches his keys,
Sixtos, Magana, Masias, y Ruiz sing with the Mexican radio, “canto no llores,” but back home they always heard it live.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries.

He cruises in his Range Rover, traveling south, freckled left arm out the window to catch the breeze
while the workers count wages, Sixtos daydreaming of his sweet Maria and the necklace he’d like buy.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.

Later, she will say to the reporters: “My husband was a man of integrity,”
Explaining why he swerved left to outwit Sixtos and his compadres as they oversteered, danced, and jived.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries

The papers he graded drift across the median and settle amidst the daisies.
The carnage of torsos and decapitations, a freckled left arm, strewn across fifty yards like candy from a piñata scattered for the passers-by.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.

Counseling and condolences are offered to the authorities.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes.
He kisses his wife.