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

The question mark in the title does all the work — 'Communication?' asks whether witnessing a dying man and cutting a throat are separate acts or the same one performed at different speeds. The poem's mirror structure — 'You can quite again away the note / We're the ones who cut the throat' — implicates the reader directly: to have read the poem is to have been 'nowhere around it' and everywhere inside it simultaneously.