Communication?
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
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.
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.