This Found poem was created with the words of Hernando Tellez in the short story, “Lather and Nothing Else” In the text, Hernando Tellez creates a complex moral situation when Torres, the captain, positions himself in an extremely easy place for the protagonist (narrator) to kill him. The protagonist and antagonist are on opposing sides of the civil war in Columbia, where the protagonist is a secret rebel as a barber, and the antagonist is the executioner on the government’s side.

The first conflict in the story was person to person at the exposition of the story, when “He didn’t greet anyone when he came in,” starts to build tension, as the barber is a secret rebel, and faces his enemy in his shop. The protagonist is then left to a situation where he could easily kill his enemy, and is entangled whether to kill Torres with his razor or not. This leads directly to the second conflict, the internal conflict inside the barber. Torres is a man who killed many people on the protagonist’s side, and the barber killing him seems unsurprising, however, the protagonist faces another conflict, person to society. According to the text, “No one deserves to be the sacrifice that turns other people into murderers… until the world is a sea of blood.” This shows how the barber realizes that if he kills the captain, someone from the government will come and kill him, and then the rebels will start fighting against the government. In my Found poem, the phrase “Murder or Hero?” reflects on this part, whether the action of killing the military captain is a heroic act, or the murderer of many other people. Therefore, if he killed the captain, he would become the murderer of many other people, as they began to take revenge on each other (the government and the rebels).

My found poem is split into four sections, where the first section mentions the protagonist and antagonist, and the identity of the protagonist as a secret revolutionary. The second section is mainly about the barber picturing the scene of himself murdering Torres in his thoughts. The third section is about the debate inside the barber (monolog), whether to kill Torres or not. His final decision was to be a barber, and take the job of shaving the military captain honorably, by lather and nothing else. The final section is where Torres pays the barber for his services, this is where the author creates a complex moral situation with the final twist in the last paragraph, which increases the complexity of the situation, when it turns out that the captain knew all along that the barber was a secret revolutionary, and he walked into the barber shop knowing there was a chance that he would never walk out.