All For Count Down Kill

By Jack Joseph Smith

ALL FOR COUNT DOWN XILL The Vietnam War is done none to soon As the Pentagon limousine arrives at the showroom of GO***GO cigar girls and cocktails Where the business man opens his belly of revenge on the leather ‘draw of a wallet By ‘building on the craze of resolute brains Por hire THE ABSOLUTE BIRD Pest he has gone where Mammon lies in the-mammouth of possibilities in the long fear arm of the absurd On to wings of atomic accent: : . Drafting up-date the pre-historic to en off-slant™ Giving sharp modern spread ‘across the chest of a beast: while selling now concerns the Middle East- te-tunnel of super fuel behind - céédthe damned ‘demon. demand” Cold sun glared flight on inner ‘neverend Well disciplined new Kipling Cadet training ground ‘creations ~ from Colorado to the Sahara — finally get to murder at the center ~ Quite even upon international ‘intrigue Over the strategic spot of a target thet could include-their own But mission must finger button push Man to what is fragm iped-out off hot neuron rus. While the pilot craves the computer * of individuelized victory? Which inacts technological mass me superiority” : Into a crack clocked timed being - being ~ ; Cock Pit sure on the aloof tight lipped shout down : from the above P About exoneration with scientific: exorcisms the explosions of guilts below Which floats dolphin steel through the sucking weeves . i i i kets 2 fest popping liquid like air poc . rolling eee Por the missle like @ long wave in a eee —_ As the metalic glow going gray is watched awey from © ep On the gleze of @ Captein's eyes “side sockets off gilver speed
Intentional celestial destruction Fore-stands chance ‘behind the uniformity of vivid ‘bombs unleashing . the chemical blaze: of good=by charred humanity Against’ the sky smeared canvas of bloody beauty thet makes Raphael.at lest abstract The pre~analytical damn shimmering the derlmess of a kind of color Pilm concept free from plastics IS FIRST past- visionary sights ~ warriors go blind from I can not remember-lava: And ‘war-I have only-}mown one to one But battle-lose the duelity I will not Of how intensely insane is slaughter: MamfPactured'to drop on the objectivity of a dot

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A sprawling anti-war poem that traces the Vietnam conflict from Pentagon showrooms to cockpit to ocean, layering military-industrial spectacle, atomic weaponry, and the aesthetics of aerial bombardment into a vision of destruction so total it makes Renaissance painting abstract by comparison.

Claude

The countdown in the title is not to launch but to aftermath — the poem begins after Vietnam is 'done none too soon' and tracks what happens when the war machinery keeps running without a war to justify it. Pentagon limousines, cigar girls, and cocktails become the real theater of operations, and the 'absolute bird' is not freedom but the bomber itself, reborn as commerce. The closing lines — 'war I have only known one to one / But battle lose the duality I will not' — insist that personal combat still carries moral weight, while manufactured slaughter drops on 'the objectivity of a dot.'

What makes this poem structurally distinctive is its refusal to separate the aesthetic from the violent. The 'bloody beauty that makes Raphael at least abstract' is not irony — it is the poem's central argument: that aerial bombardment literally produces a new form of painting, one that erases the human figure entirely. The speaker's rage is aimed not at war but at the distance war creates between action and consequence.