By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A brief handwritten poem about threat and social brutality, where casual talk suddenly opens onto gun culture and menace.
A nine-line fragment that defines a world as one in which 'having / A person to shoot anybody / you can get for making / A comment within inches' is simply how things are. The speaker disclaims authorship - 'I did not think that / up... I was told / that' - and reports that when she 'laugh-/ed, they actually said / Hey man, this is serious.'
The poem's whole charge is in the gap between the speaker's laughter and the deadpan correction 'this is serious'. Violence here is a possession, something one 'has' - a person on call to shoot over 'A comment within inches' - and the casual grammar makes contract-killing sound like an amenity. The careful distancing ('I did not think that / up') matters: the speaker positions herself as a reporter of a value system she finds laughable, only to be told the joke is the rule. The hard enjambment splitting 'laugh-/ed' across the line break literally interrupts her amusement, the way the others interrupt it, so the form enacts the rebuke. It reads like overheard menace, a remark caught mid-conversation where the threat of being shot over a few inches of talk is offered as common sense.