How Low Is Renaissance

By Jack Joseph Smith

An acting straight citizen is driving - The work the citizen does is in coins That operate machines For human consumption and fun The place where the citizen must park is caverned ' Into an alley where beneath media concern Vision and sound have darkened their turn Death not on Heroin But of a copperhead A hot red copperhead Slashed by tempered ‘ice As the citizen who can't crystalize any more blues and whites Went willing into the wild along the wall Seeing strangely a citizen's soul go into the role of a Hyena And there at street phantom perception Rushed a deliberate monster From the citizen's bowels through the citizen's lungs Wailing in length the wordless animalistically formed into a-ye-ea! Wild enough to help The copperhead was spread with blood barely breathing While the assilants miraculously conceived of the citizen in cold distain And left nonchalantly the copperhead with the citizen accounting for the siren on the motor tin

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A narrative poem tracing a citizen's descent from mechanical, coin-operated civility into an alley where violence, drug culture, and an animal scream erupt from beneath the surface of urban life.

The poem builds through accumulating detail, from parking and machines to copperhead violence and an animalistic wail, staging the distance between civic surface and feral depth.

Claude

The title's question — how low is renaissance — gets answered in the alley: rebirth happens not at the civic surface but at the animal bottom, where the citizen's soul goes into the role of a Hyena and the wordless scream forms itself into 'a-ye-ea!' The citizen who operates machines for fun descends through cavern, copperhead, and blood to reach something the poem insists is wild enough to help.

The poem's longest and most narrative piece in this sequence, it reads like a street parable. The 'acting straight citizen' is the key phrase — acting, not being. The renaissance the title asks about is not cultural refinement but the violent return of what civility suppresses, and the siren on the motor tin is its only witness.