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By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This fragment reads like a compact American threat-image built from dream, flag, zealotry, field, and weapon.
The scan-backed corrections make the fragment less provisional while preserving its broken, accusatory syntax. Patriotism and menace still collapse into the same scene: a real American dream, abstract flag-blood, a muddy field, and a moonlit bat.
A short coda titled by its first line, 'For THE REAL American DREAM.' Those 'Circling the Abstract blood of A flag, / have never found' it, the poet tells 'You AND ME MR. ZELOT' - a direct address to the zealot that folds speaker and reader into the same failure. It closes once more on 'A Muddy field, / And A MoonLit BASEBALL BAT,' the book hammering its plain-field, bat-in-hand emblem until it reads as the only real dream left.