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By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"The Call" binds failed devotion, administrative greed, and the trade in drugs and guns into one field where calling out evil risks being answered by the same evil.
Going and staying are presented as equally compromised, so the poem's real subject is not decision but entrapment. The line about loving Jesus "that way" suggests a wound caused by obedience, charisma, or religious overreach rather than simple belief. Money, weapons, and moral theater blur together until the speaker arrives at a terrible rule: in a corrupt order, one is pushed to become even worse just to survive it.
fhe Call (earlier draft) runs a failed missionary hop from Africa to priesthood (got hurt loving Jesus that way) into an administrator pricing sheet music with no one to play, then pivots to arms and drugs: if evil is the market, be more evil than they.