Page 68

By Jack Joseph Smith

The long drawn out death of truth r Dosen't sing the chant of evil or . as a child dosen't inmediately-go to take: " And it dosen't steal like a swift thief It rather grows: backwards down to: r" Your nothingness: Until’ it ferments desease against. life like the shadow of death the = fish feel. r from a poluted friend in a pond = r

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Truth's death is imagined as a slow contamination that reduces a person toward nothingness and poisons life from within.

Like the earlier version of the poem, these lines insist that falsehood is not flashy theft but patient degradation. The shift to "nothingness" makes the damage feel even more complete, as if corruption hollows out the self until only vacancy remains. The polluted pond image keeps the moral claim bodily and ecological, with death spreading through an apparently shared environment.

Claude

Second pass at the blackness-of-argument epigram from page 47, with 'nothingness' in place of 'littleness'.

The doubling sharpens the verdict — the second recension is colder because 'nothingness' removes even scale from the decay. The 'polluted friend in a pond' image carries over intact, as if the poet couldn't find a better figure for slow moral rot. The repetition is evidence of the poem being worked rather than archived.