Communication?

By Jack Joseph Smith

SEE I SAW YOU? I saw a man as he lay dying He was anywhere in the war of wailing But who would rhetorically know Because that's the do in the way the saying goes Listen as modern saber just called blade Cuts through the personage of a throat Now watch close tinted eye shade Then throw away the quite of this note OQ, your not the one who found it I see you were no-where around it Go ahead completely I'm gone succinctly You can quite again away the note We're the ones who cut the throat

Original Scan

Page 58

AI Interpretation

GPT

A short, accusatory poem that collapses the distance between witness and perpetrator, where seeing a dying man and cutting a throat become the same rhetorical act, and the note itself becomes complicit in the violence it describes.


Claude

A short, rhymed, accusatory lyric whose title's question mark refuses the comfort of its noun. It opens 'SEE I SAW YOU?' and reports 'a man as he lay dying ... anywhere in the war of wailing,' then turns a 'modern saber just called blade' that 'Cuts through the personage of a throat.' The second half rounds on a 'you' who claims distance - 'your not the one who found it / I see you were no-where around it' - before the couplet snaps the trap shut: 'You can quite again away the note / We're the ones who cut the throat.'

The poem treats communication as guilt's relay rather than understanding: every act of reading, seeing, or 'quiet'-ing the note is folded into the throat-cutting it pretends to merely witness. The pun on 'quite' for 'quiet' does double duty - to quiet the note and to do away with it 'again' - so silence becomes another stroke of the blade. The shift from singular 'I saw a man' to the collective confession 'We're the ones' implicates speaker and addressee together, dissolving the alibi of having been 'no-where around it.' The rhymes are deliberately tidy against a grisly subject, sharpening the irony. The text is relatively clean, so this reading rests directly on its lines.