By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page joins a handwritten claim that not knowing who you are produces war with a typed refusal of conscription, exhaustion, and the strange quiet of younger people nearby.
The cleaned transcript changes the page from a damaged fragment into a layered page: handwritten identity-and-war language sits above a typed poem of memory, refusal, and fatigue. The ending's quiet building gives the whole page a worn, watchful mood.
'Never a conscript' layers a handwritten claim - 'it is / hard to find out who you are, and that / is why there is war' - over a typed poem of fatigue and refusal. The source's 'sholder' lets soldier and shoulder blur as the speaker remembers 'Thinking of myself / As a sholder', now 'silent as a dog / that has had it'. The poem dismisses the easy surrender 'I can't do it anymore / Which is not true' and settles into a worn, watchful close among 'these / young people in the building' and 'how quiet it is tonight.'