Felony
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem turns assault into a moral and mental compression where judgment becomes brutally binary.
Its shortness is part of its severity. The piece refuses elaboration and instead narrows everything toward decision, sides, and subtraction, which makes `Just get rid of one` feel cold, legal, and personal all at once.
Seven lines. The double use of 'assult' (Jack's spelling, kept) makes the horror recursive — it is the assault, then the horror of what the assault makes you become. 'So you can not asign life / to two sides' is the page's moral claim: violence refuses the binaries that would let you survive it. 'Just get rid of one' is cold the way a title is cold — it names the logic without endorsing it. The shortest, harshest piece in the collection.