By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The First Instruction reduces youth to appetite, rot, admired weapons, and pretty intoxicants, then oddly asks children to guard the adult.
The command to eat until death is smelled makes bodily life sound like a bargain already turning bad between tongue and soul. Rifles and knives are granted surface beauty, which is part of the danger: they attract before they wound. Beer, car, and whiskey extend that same seduction into adulthood, and the last line inverts care by making children the watchers.
'The First Instruction' is the cleaner, earlier twin of 'The Last Instruction': the same survivalist counsel to 'Eat you meat, chicken and beans, up to the day / you smell death; in your good young life, / between tongue and soul.' Spoilage becomes shared fate - 'When they go bad you go bad too' - while 'A rifel and a knife are a pleasure to look at' makes menace attractive and the dare 'Make sure you haven't seen noth'in yet' keeps threat open-ended. As 'beer and car' and 'whiskey' turn 'prettey,' the closing inversion makes children the guardians: 'Don't forget to tell the kids to watch out for you.' Source spellings 'Eat you,' 'rifel,' 'noth'in,' and 'prettey' are preserved.