By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem turns killing and not killing into rival ideas of heaven, exclusion, beauty, and survival.
The page frames morality as a question of where one is allowed to belong. Its closing claim of being a bastard child from L.A. gives the theological question a blunt biographical edge.
The poem turns killing into a question of admission - which 'part of Heaven / you want to go to,' or whether not killing is 'that place / you are never let into.' Having found that 'beauty is weak' and 'life is less / than the moment,' the speaker disarms the fear with identity: 'I am a bastard child / from L.A.'