An Americans Televised Lebanamese Philosophy

By Jack Joseph Smith

an Americans Televised Lebanamese Philosophy Guilt forces its way into the soul Guilt knows how to construct a cage It supposes the darkness no human breathes a way through without the gun business Twentieth century infidel can no longer abide by the claesical crusader King of Concept lonely but willful (must be gone) Secret: SO arriving at the curve of scorn THE EVERYMAN decides to academic, away God knowing, the He of Him is not oblidged to change time individually just for a second coming for the whites left in, our eyes? To make a point for history in the self of our theology; guilt grins pallid under frozen flesh, and likes looking back How long must the spirited soul stey terrible Unquestions the walled cry of the letting man of shoulder clips down Ag/ic ed b} In an alley retriveces pees newsreel: Atlantic shock, satellite sure on programed reality knows not how this deadly actor has kept out of this American's picture We are afraid of pinned hatred in half eyes on watch he uses ? for his next SRE touch ON forward 4; Im At the place where distance makes ‘its twist His cause refrained him from taking the gun Tight alone, to the right or left side of a eoo coming singular brain ending his cultural pain About the explosion that left children without skin While Lebanonese Philosophy remembered bows on the Sun Telling what is old oddly enhancing the new in life exists not in the redish whisper or the purple ghost when camouf lage will always let both side power seekers see who you have become
Listen for a completeness in all mathematical nothingness That touches beneath the fury of flesh At your vast soundlessness of collision That feels meaning happens before the collapse into the aftermath of necessarily termed justification, - that takes over with another loss to (is I am) for the so called politics of the totalitarian that cheats to rip behind the statement of the State ~ that there is wisdom onlyooe when the idea of beginning and ending inbetween becomes a restricted things Man must deal with more than the competitive terror in understanding Earth's imaginative way to the Sun On a last challange seeking the blast of uncleshing interchange; sight of violence in Pront of the Sun is 50 large, that the Sun will recognize painful struggle, rather than orgenizational anger to get there While being is the entire ways if one desires life and light at the same man made momentece %o consider existence is first over the huge second of war Existence perceives existence; War experiences wart Which troubles the abyss petween all those gods and demons Preshistorically worshiped for being peopled in religion While equal down from man's scientific place on the Moon, essence in glass squared is the sequence of insect birth Kow; about to be his visions (under the fire nemed justice) The marble of a killer mind, begins to be formed by the fathomlessness In a stomach of quick intellectual guts That moves inner against two types of morter ranscendence not 30 different when tank might hes a pyramid involvement with eternal dodtece and both reaching the top point on angled hunger? The comradeship of hope arched all iron and stones Its sculptured heart over Hell's reality inbombment YOU ARE COLD AND DRIVEN TO A SICK BOVE Oe ARD BY THE G OOD COMPANY CCMAND Mast) BY THE GOAT BL Oi sey GENERALIZING UNIDENT IF TABLE DEATH AS HUM
Back when Leban@gese Philosophy came to New York City The poet-man Kahlil Gibran; (where Hell beats out all but Limbo on its jagged jaded jettison through Purgatory to the Heaven of the Dead industralist priest) made that underground walking up World Worker rocks, a flowing stream for simple space A hard bargained challenge soldier To ease out the emotion of murder In connection with tongue to hand, ae what is left in the eye in the stomach in doings While the memory .of live and let lives does not grasp the microswatchfulooe At ally maneuvering tables of suit and sash Desert eyebrows oil smooths missile eyeballs are suncken to the sockets with that weight FIBER TO TISSUE ROLLS ALONG THE QUIET STIR OF POWER Lebanmese Philosophy tells all the men in the Halls to go to the fields to get their hands dirty But TeVe told New York Citys that blood in the fingernaile, jan't any different than make-up The gain on guiltees is like the horses lungs over the stones - From the castle window? Just another believer in the winds until SHE'S shoed for work or war The gain on guilt? There ie none but the Devil on this level? As Lebangese Philosophy begins to dancesce down in white turns spinning through the red as a Dervish Its got a cross for a brainy. and this lone witness can see through its head qq ani this cross is crossed in the steel of swords glowing again with Medieval silvers yet with studded jewels instead of a body of art for an altar When Lebanggese Philosophy spun into ashes; and floated away through the rifle fire The soldier witness heard the voice GAINING STRENGTH
Can't there be conception Through the upper bent lipped sush of women for a sister Within the market place On the run for homeseoe Fired molten to the sand stone By abstract noses they paint in Leda Doing the done down govern rule of thmbd on a machine-gunned American magazine cover That would sicken any Frenchmen loving "Flowers of Evil* When even the concepts of cycle and transcendence in religious afterdeath In the sameness of man to mcmment in cathedral or mosque Will stay forever suncken by deadly constructed Slike C ANNO A Blood at least beneath the bomb blown concret of shrapnel streets Between Christian and Moslem, oiled over street fighter faces For the long range goal of rubble Absolutely singular Whenever the circle of the World is mentioned Get the timing of truth through your particular gravity ring of Earth Sealing souls ageless Jo deliberate demands Gone with hate in the apellbinding etrength; that can not be accepted, as unincouraged by fear While it remainseoee wc. a To tell a worm to stop feeding off a graveyard is incorrect While it is also understood by Americas that a boy must worship the fabled quicksand of the father, or he will never carry the heart of the mother with him as a wanderer Let alone a gunner for a elaughter
When his ear decided not to follow its disappearance; it was because it was more af the windless void, that moves from a force beyond language From Earth's standpoint the Sun had just paseeds the other way through the last side of the Moons Some do by days some wait for nightooo It was all the same in Beirut Except, on account of the shelling, the old men can't listen politely, to the twenty four radio anymore The best cef'es were always on the corner, he recalled And he noticed that the wise crusty jaws look more so when their dead And it occurred to the warrior, that his worlds major light, simply used the Moon or Sun to find it So warrior many did not drop his hands, fold his knees, or bend his head Until the New Lebanagese Philosophy hit him between the eyea with the automatic light NOW you will be able to see beyond mes witnessed the Old Lebana@siese Philosophy For that is where you have just seen me also be

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A sprawling meditation on American guilt, televised war in Lebanon, religious violence, and the failure of mystical language to survive the spectacle of modern conflict, drawing on Kahlil Gibran, crusader imagery, and the Sun as a cosmic witness.

The poem moves through several registers — political accusation, theological questioning, and visionary address — treating the television screen as a new kind of mirror in which American distance from suffering becomes itself a form of violence.

Claude

The poem's central argument is that watching war on television does not produce understanding but guilt — and guilt, far from being passive, 'knows how to construct a cage.' By routing Lebanese philosophy through Gibran's New York, through crusader history, through Beirut's shelled cafes, the speaker insists that American spectatorship is not a neutral position but a form of complicity that the Sun itself will eventually judge.

The five-page sprawl is essential to the poem's method. It refuses the compression that television demands — instead of a thirty-second segment it gives us theological density, sensory overload, and rhetorical exhaustion. The final image of the 'automatic light' hitting the warrior between the eyes collapses the distance between ancient and modern violence, making the television and the gun barrel the same aperture.