By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
At an older age, the speaker links alcoholism to an imaginative substitute for love or war, while still drawing a hard line between that habit and the harsher world of hard drugs.
The page is reflective without becoming innocent. The scan-corrected punctuation makes alcoholism an imagined substitute for love or war, while hard drugs remain a different kind of damage.
A plainspoken confession dated by age: 'Here I am in my sixties saying / that I understand Alcholism'. The logic is the collection's recurring substitution - drink fills the vacancy where the great forces are absent, 'because if there isn't love or war / you get to imagine it'. But the speaker marks a limit he will not cross in sympathy: 'I still don't get hard drugs, / especially in the ways their used', and extends that puzzlement even to companions he respects, 'all the way / to the Hell's Angel's / who I've liked'. The candor is in admitting both the understanding and its boundary. Source forms 'Alcholism' and 'their used' are kept verbatim.