By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This repeat of 'Stink' keeps the rough work-song mode, offering sobriety, labor, motion, and exposure to new things as the only durable route through boredom and falseness.
Its roughness is part of its authority. The page sounds like counsel from someone who has had to reduce life to repeatable basics.
Titled 'Stink', this is a rough imperative work-song for staying clear-eyed. Sobriety brings disenchantment - 'So sober now / Can't see the lie / The wonder of boordum' - and the poem answers with a string of plain commands: 'Don't get drunk / Go to work', 'Pass through the valley / Sing in the canyon', 'Don't sleep by / the ocean shore'. Its instructions get strange and physical - 'Drift down the mountain / with your plank', 'Fish with getting stung' - before turning outward to encounter: 'Come on out / and go to film / Sit back and fall / in front of something / new to you'. The cure for boredom and falseness is motion and willing exposure to the new.