By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
'Also Ran' stages age, youth, race, barroom sightlines, dust, watchtowers, black eyes, and desire through a drunken comparison between the speaker and a young brown-skinned woman.
It is a difficult page, and the scan-corrected version keeps that difficulty visible. The poem exposes the speaker's gaze while the marginal handwriting makes the page feel unsettled and still under revision.
Titled 'Also Ran,' a barroom self-portrait built on stark age and race contrasts. The opening pairs 'Me old and falling down' against 'Her the finest of brown,' the speaker 'drunk and young' yet 'both being bull shit'.' Borrowed and local imagery mix - 'All along the watch tower / and around the bar room rail' - while 'Each black eye that I saw / lose / had been good to my ease-of one.' The longing is for sameness across an unbridgeable gap: 'Her skin matched mine / Except for so much youth,' the cavern 'Still as dust.' It ends on a charged aesthetic stance, 'Reaching for a negro song / Rejecting Rap' (the last a handwritten replacement). This reading stays provisional: the page is mixed-quality with dense right-margin handwriting that was noted but not placed into the body.