By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Truth's death is imagined as a slow contamination that reduces a person toward nothingness and poisons life from within.
Like the earlier version of the poem, these lines insist that falsehood is not flashy theft but patient degradation. The shift to "nothingness" makes the damage feel even more complete, as if corruption hollows out the self until only vacancy remains. The polluted pond image keeps the moral claim bodily and ecological, with death spreading through an apparently shared environment.
Typed on Music Distributing Company letterhead, the untitled poem says 'The long drawn out death of truth / Dosen't sing the chant of evil', 'dosen't immediately go / to take' and 'dosen't steal like a swift / thief'; instead 'It rather grows backwards down to / Your nothingness / Until it ferments desease against / life', like the shadow of death fish feel 'from a poluted friend in a pond -'.
The poem defines the loss of truth by what it is not: not a dramatic villain, not a greedy child, not a quick thief, but a slow backward growth that hollows a person out. The closing image moves the decay into an ecosystem, where contamination comes from a 'friend' sharing the same water, making betrayal quiet and environmental. The repeated source spelling 'dosen't' gives the refrain a stubborn, spoken rhythm.