By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This handwritten page twists prayer language through a damaged cosmology and the startling phrase 'Holy Goat,' then ends by valuing peaceful earthly living over some imagined farther place.
The tone is half prayer, half correction of prayer. The opening crash in the universe and the altered sacred formula, including father a son, make the page feel suspicious of inherited sanctity, while the ending turns away from transcendence toward a modest local peace.
Prayer is corroded into cosmic wreckage here: God becomes 'a star / that too had crashed,' and the benediction mangles into 'the father a son / and Holy Goat,' yet the speaker refuses the beyond ('I will never be / there') in favor of staying to 'live / this peaceful way.'