By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A national commander's language of cleansing promises love, innocence, and relief from pain, while the speaker ends by shrouding the tongue.
The page turns purification into a coercive lesson: washing hands, cleansing souls, teaching love, and producing innocence all sound like domination under moral cover. The repeated rinsing of pain into purity resembles conversion, therapy, and punishment at once, because innocence is manufactured rather than discovered. The final shrouded tongue is the only answer left when language has been used to bless erasure.
The United States as Pilate: washes its hands, claims to cleanse your soul, teaches you to love and be innocent; rinses you of pain as you listen. 'You have wrung yourself dry, across my heart / Now I shroud my tongue.'