Insulting the Abstraction

By Jack Joseph Smith

Death gets tired of yearning for time Talking with the re-visited has no shame In order to be insulted Someone else does have to be there The power you don't want to split, that places the body and the mind, at that bare curve over the top; is not retorical like a bully, rather, it is just communication without a camera, not even a foot upon the stage It should be particular among the young To know that sophistication is not messing with anyone else's mind
Replete is the vision of yourself Everyone is caught by, even challenged with your being a household word Say you strut your stuff, and look back once Memory and the dream you do, while you are awake, sleep together And it is impossible To shine the gem stone When you are alone Now when I was a child I thought that I could at least kill one man And here far grown I am asked to accept slaughter as just, the way you have a nightmare twice

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem against empty sophistication, insisting that abstraction becomes dangerous when it loses moral contact with bodies, speech, and consequence.

It feels like a manifesto against aestheticized cruelty and detached cleverness.

Claude

Death getting tired of yearning for time is the poem's foundational inversion — it is not the living who fear death but death that grows impatient with the living's delay. From there the poem attacks abstraction itself, insisting that any thought that loses contact with bodies and speech has already become a form of cruelty.

The title's aggression is the point: abstraction here is not a neutral mode of thought but something that deserves to be insulted, because its detachment from consequence is itself a kind of violence.