By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Watching like Christ at world's end gives way to labor, pictures, parental posing, and command, insisting that sameness across the sun is the wrong kind of attention.
The poem attacks false vigilance: anyone who thinks every second across the sun is the same has stopped really seeing. War is displaced by work and image-making, which sounds peaceful at first but quickly becomes another system of control. The order to shut up arrives after children instruct parents how to pose, turning inheritance into performance.
'I am Not Going To Tell You Twice': watch like Christ when you watched the end of the world — did you keep your infantry? Every second across the sun is the same; we aren't going to war anymore, we're putting to work, drawing pictures for us. 'We have never been lost / We tell our parents how to pose / So shut up.'