Page 72
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
No Matter What Now erupts with violence, obscenity, grief, gendered confusion, desire, and abandonment, while handwritten corrections around DESEASTER and heart keep the page visibly in revision.
The language is deliberately unruly. The scan-verified corrections sharpen the pivot from rage into wounded memory, making loss feel both comic, misspelled, and unending.
'No Matter What Now' opens in raw fury - 'Kill the mother fuckers / String them up / Fuck them all and feed them fishheads' - then collapses inward: 'Lost like a sock / I am down and under and gone.' Grief turns tender mid-poem, 'Her vision was always right for me,' and finds its sweetest detail in self-mockery: 'My DESEASTER made her laugh / That being the best part.' The ending refuses the consolation of escape - 'Never to go back is a dream / Isn't it' - and arrives at the flat truth 'That loss dosen't stop.'