Mein Kampf has Better Reviews Than One Hundred Years of Solitude
       

on Amazon—I found out today,
at the exact moment a sound
like drowning (or heaving) took me
and my ears hostage, as a kerfuffie
of futile scrapping tried desperately
to keep a bird atop a ledge, so as not
to tumble from my fifth-floor air conditioner.

I could tell you: Nature is breathtaking
or carefully describe how the scent
of my daughter's sweat-dampened
scalp, just after she's woken and taken
that long drawl of a yawn, is still cradled
by the pillow on my lap where her nape
was restingjust sixteen minutes ago, but
what would that prove?

Once, I watched a slight, nervous man
in a starched, pressed uniform empty
a flurry of baton hits on the limp skull
of a homeless man for snatching
a rich woman's purse. Watching, I felt freed
of my innocence, all seven and a half
years of my life seemed to evaporate
into the thick summer air of Central Park.
It was 1989 and I knew, definitively,
for the first time, how easily
I could kill or be killed.

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Copyright © 2020 Carlos Andrés Gómez All rights reserved
from Hijito
Platypus Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission