By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Watching like Christ at world's end gives way to labor, pictures, inherited instruction, 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 behave, turning inheritance into performance.
A commanding, apocalyptic harangue spoken in a collective 'we.' The title's threat, 'I am Not Going To Tell You Twice,' is followed by 'Watch like Christ' and 'Uno mas,' then a test of vigilance: 'When you watched / the end of the world / Did you keep your memory.' The poem insists that 'Every second across the sun! / is the same thing' and that to miss this is to be 'not paying attention.' Its utopian swerve replaces war with labor and art - 'we are putting to work, drawing / pictures for us' - while claiming a strange authority of the young over the old: 'We have never been lost / We tell our parents how / to behave / So shut up.' The closed-fist certainty is the point, righteous and faintly menacing at once.