Page 126
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This draft of 'The Moment' moves from intoxicated perception and a refusal to listen toward Adamic myth, bragged power, destitution, and the collapse of love into addiction.
The corrected text shows a rough but coherent meditation on withdrawal and disassembly. The visible correction marks matter as manuscript evidence, while the typed poem itself keeps circling truth, isolation, and dependency.
'The Moment' is a dense draft about withdrawal and disassembly, where time becomes 'A simposium' and presence dissolves so 'all is taken apart'. The speaker withholds attention - 'we do not stoop our ear, / or show our window tongue, to anyone' - and frames intoxication as a kind of evaporated sight: 'Seeing is simple when your stoned, it just leaves'. Myth crosses the street language ('We watched it all and Adam swallowed it instead'), and bragged 'power' only 'places me alone'. It ends destitute, 'true as a drum beat that has sank', insisting the real wound 'It's not the bitch or the bastard your coming from. / when your dying from love and addiction'. The visible correction marks make this read as live manuscript, not finished poem.