The Fall I Never Feared

By Jack Joseph Smith

Though lost in time Don't say I did not see anything devine Stumbled over the rocks Haunted by broken glass Staying insane Seconds on a stop watch There staring at the pain You must see the likelyhood that I had evolved into ghost I had taken the wind to task and done what no sane man would I guess the wind just searched me down So its curiousity could see around the place where I had gone and find out what I had found
I thought I had turned This wind in my favor Which I certainly had on many more than deserved occasion Though ten thousand times too much, I did lend my soul to bad behavior And thus to accomplish. to be near enough to touch. the structural gift There I set sail against The joining of something The bowing to anything The accepting or the being accepted There I was never to leave myself open or up to question Or worse to have to admit That most often
I could not match the wind To go as high as we desired Which of course would be alone and on our own To rise over the disreguard of disaster Until dear and humble life had no chance of ever being seen again

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A meditation on ambition, wind, isolation, and ruin in which striving upward becomes inseparable from spiritual risk and self-exposure.

The poem keeps testing whether transcendence is courage, pride, or a form of refusal.

Claude

A three-page poem of reckless ascent and its cost, in which the speaker insists 'Don't say I did not / see anything devine' even after he 'Stumbled over the rocks' and was 'Haunted by broken glass / Staying insane'. He has 'taken the wind to task / and done what no sane man would', turned it 'in my favor / on many more than deserved occasion', and confesses he 'did lend my soul to bad behavior' while refusing 'The joining of something / The bowing to anything', driving 'dear and humble life' to where it has 'no chance of ever / being seen again'.

The unfeared fall is not a stumble but a chosen, dangerous rising - the speaker contends with 'the wind' as a rival, claiming mastery he half-knows is hubris ('most often / I could not match the wind / To go as high as we desired'). The poem's spiritual ambivalence is its engine: divine vision arrives through damage ('Stumbled over the rocks', 'evolved into ghost'), and the refusal to bow, join, or be 'accepted' reads as both fierce independence and self-isolation, since rising 'would be alone / and on our own'. The cost is named plainly at the close - in soaring 'over the disreguard / of disaster', he risks driving ordinary, 'humble life' out of sight entirely. The title's bravado ('I never feared') is undercut by the wreckage the poem catalogues. Preserve source spellings 'devine', 'likelyhood', 'curiousity', 'disreguard'.