By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Crawling away and buying replacement guns down the road turns weapons into disposable objects, so terror cannot masquerade as the soul that must be saved.
The argument depends on contempt for the gun's supposed sacredness. A weapon can be left in the dirt, replaced down the road, and separated from the body without damaging the soul. By calling guns something other than paintings, the poem also refuses to aestheticize them; they are tools, and violence fails precisely because it pretends to be essence.
An argument that strips weapons of any sacred status: 'On both sides / Talking to terror / Your guns are not, / your soul.' If pressed, 'we can crawl out of there / and leave the guns behind,' because 'The guns are not paintings' - not objects to be revered or aestheticized. Their disposability is the whole point: 'We can get them again; / right down the road.' The closing line draws the moral the rest of the page has been building toward - 'This is why violence / is not the soul.' Source wording 'ret away' is preserved.