By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page moves through weapons, flight, friendship, crude attachment, and class identity in a voice that feels cornered but still defiant.
The speaker lists dangerous options and reversals without settling into a single confession. Its late insistence on not being 'black American poverty' sounds like a refusal to let suffering become somebody else's label.
'Shuned' is a confession built as a ledger of having and losing, each couplet a possession undone by an action: 'I had a good knife / And thought about it', 'I had even a better gun / and ran', 'I had a friend / and I left', 'I had a slutt / and I came back'. The reassurance 'Don't worry yourself / It will all work out' rings hollow against that pattern of flight and return. The poem reaches toward singular vision - 'Can you imagine seeing / What no one else / ever has' - then ends on a self-claim immediately retracted: 'I am black American poverty / No I am not', the speaker grabbing at an identity of suffering and then refusing to wear it.