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By Jack Joseph Smith

If ever I have had violence in my heart I have it now And violence is not pro-tem Those not Jesus and Dostoyevsky Don't mess- For a second I went to be kind in remembering the spelling But if Mountain Europeans think they have grounds on gossipp hate- Catch me walking down a city street I have those I want to murder They have done me wrong to die My Christian force knows evil After my heart will die But I am strong willed And believe in the mind It can not tolerate the false Though it does justify The Hell of it is I just got away with it kid

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem is a raw confession of murderous anger that struggles to square itself with intellect and Christian conscience.

Violence is named without disguise and without temporary excuse, which gives the opening its force. The speaker keeps testing that fury against ideas of mind, truth, evil, and justification, as if thought can expose the false but cannot fully stop the urge to kill. The closing line turns chillingly casual, making the whole outburst feel like both a moral crisis and a grim boast.

Claude

A manifesto of present-tense violence, framed as moral clarity rather than rage, ending on a wry kid's voice.

The poem doesn't excuse the violence; it insists it is justified by the falseness being punished. The aside about Jesus and Dostoyevsky is load-bearing — it lines the speaker up with a tradition that takes evil seriously rather than airing it on a porch. The closing 'I just got away with it kid' puts the whole monologue in the mouth of somebody who has cooled off and is explaining, which reframes the heat above as remembered temperature, not current weather.