The Man I Killed

This is a blackout poem, which is when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text-like in a newspaper-and starts redacting words until a poem is formed. The key thing with a blackout poem is that the text AND redacted text form a sort of visual poem. This poem is to represent a chapter called "The Man I Killed" in the novel, "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien. A man named Kiowa, killed a man. A citizen and a soldier of the village of My Khe. He laments over this repeatedly in the chapter, constantly repeating to himself what he had done to this man, while trying to get him to look away. This poem is meant to be from Kiowa's eyes. It is his imagination and how he is coping with the trauma. Picturing how the man would've been if he were still alive, if Kiowa had never come to Vietnam. Although his mind reiterates the true damage he caused. I just put the words together in a paragraph rather than they're normal placement apart upon a blackened out page.