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

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

A two-page poem that opens 'Death gets tired of yearning for time' and argues that true communication is 'without a camera, / not even a foot upon the stage'. It insists 'sophistication is not / messing with anyone else's mind', warns that 'it is impossible / To shine the gem stone / When you are alone', and ends on a chilling moral reversal: as a child the speaker 'thought that I could / at least kill one man', and 'far grown' is now 'asked / to accept slaughter as just, / the way you have a nightmare twice'.

The title's 'abstraction' is the enemy: the poem keeps dragging thought back to bodies, presence, and consequence, prizing 'just communication / without a camera' over performance and the cultivation of being 'a household word'. Its insult to abstraction is ethical - to think without contact, to make a spectacle of the self ('you strut your stuff, / and look back once'), is a kind of falsity, whereas 'Memory and the dream you do, / while you are awake, / sleep together' names an honest, waking imagination. The opening personification, death 'tired of yearning for time', sets the poem against patient acquiescence, and the devastating close earns the title's aggression: childhood's bounded capacity for a single killing has been replaced, in adulthood, by a culture that asks one 'to accept slaughter as just', the recurrence figured as a 'nightmare twice'. Preserve source spellings 'retorical' and 'annoited'-style forms as written; quote 'gem stone' and 'household word' verbatim.