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

The speaker claims to have seen the divine while stumbling over rocks and haunted by broken glass — transcendence here arrives not despite damage but through it. The fall that was never feared is not a fall from grace but the physical risk of climbing, and the poem's courage lies in refusing to distinguish between the two.

The three-page span gives the poem room to test its own claim repeatedly. Each return to rocks, glass, and wind asks again whether reaching upward is bravery or hubris, and the poem's honesty is that it never quite decides.