Collateral Damage

By Miguel Velasquez

September 16, 2020

Wherever, you are now

I want you to know

How

Far your actions continue to go

The day you decided

To take my father’s life

Uncertainty and loneliness coincided

You might as well of taken mine

I tried my best to hide it

But I really wasn’t fine

The day you pulled the trigger

You also left me with a hole

A piece of something bigger

That 1 would never get to know

I wonder if you had seeds

If you wonder about us bastards too

A life haunted

By past misdeeds

Anger towards my parent

Was a symptom

My thinking was errant

My father too was a victim

But how do you explain

Death to an adolescent?

You deprived me

Of certain moments

A ball thrown to me

And words never spoken

You made my innocence

Vanish faster than expected

In a sense

You helped build the walls I erected

You reversed my life

I was enslaved while free

I found freedom inside

Now that I

Find myself in your shoes

I understand

Your point of view

A grown man

Finally seeing

Where his vision was skewed

We’re much alike

In that I repeated

The cycle of a life deleted

Tears stream down my eyes

As I

Think about the lives ...

Lived with a void