Clean

By Jack Joseph Smith

Never taking an order that you didn't know was right Working without having a job No matter of the terror never backing down Getting beat and proud to stand Not a lie about money Not a slight about another Being with children always Unclean never being with you children Going under the skirt for pure beauty Putting fear into the hear of a bar Leaving the structure as your our sin Clean eating the best of foods Clean working the toughest jobs Clean and unclean making sex into wine Clean and unclean cutting into and creating violence Just clean is not talking at all

AI Interpretation

GPT

This poem tests the word 'clean' against labor, sex, fear, money, and violence, showing how unstable any moral label becomes once lived experience enters it.

Claude

The word 'clean' is tested against every experience that should dirty it — labor without a job, orders you evaluate before following, sex, fear, money. What emerges is not a definition of cleanliness but a demonstration of how thoroughly lived experience contaminates any moral category.

The opening line ('Never taking an order that you didn't know was right') establishes a moral code that the rest of the poem proceeds to complicate. Knowing an order is right does not make following it clean — it just makes the dirt visible.