By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This second 'Loss of Quest' page returns to sunlight, dawn, rhyme, guilt, and fire to describe a self so exhausted that disappearance looks cleaner than desire.
It has the force of a refrain. The repeated version makes the emotional deadness feel more established, not less.
'The Loss of Quest' is a poem of burned-out desire: the speaker 'could care less about the sunlight / And the same about the dawn', finding 'nothing better than gone'. Its refusals are mutual and trapping - 'I can not do anything I want,. / and either can you' - and the strange imperative 'Creese your soul and fold it, / from beginning to end' makes the soul a thing to be creased shut like paper. Even the gift turns against him: 'You make me quit to speak, / though my gift is rhyme'. The ending keeps the menace open rather than resolving it - 'Guilt and fire turn on themselves, / but then again, / watch what happens when they don't' - holding out the worse possibility that self-consuming guilt could instead turn outward.