No Biological Promise

By Jack Joseph Smith

We are the last fruit out of the last lime in the soil While with the toil that will not remember the plow We are due to be ushered out of the Earth's last framework As the alert new wizards discover ‘no alarm In a particular swift magic prohibiting The slightest bow in space Instant justification comments On mirrors and waters responding The same illusion ae:-reality Hell as a planet leads in. commerce While multitudes locate knowledge Involved with the first and last months rent And om the streams we took There is a horrible rippling Between rocks that skip And kids talking facts The new ice age simply means federally funded trays For the liquor we'll need Yet we accept a governed abstraction When eyeglaseed statues put around us a sense of well being That suggests all things can be measured with a bottom line (There is a game here that appears to have a charts. that may be witnessed only without reflection, )
The nuclear and the mystic striking human vices from the societies Equally are garlanded by the replacement of non human ones Evidently mankind is perceived as offended by the deepness in the brain So the scientific is sent objectively underground Quietly missing the resulta of their projects Through the tunnel no soldier needs a spiritual crises Explains both the satisfied army And the individual revolutionary Ooming to a place where the complete universe Contains justice in the middle of passionr: It is easential to point ourselves out back to where the myth began; while seeing all our power in its strange marriage of geometry and guilt, gazing ever with the assistance of glass, actually has us ostensibility on strings,

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

An apocalyptic meditation that envisions humanity as the last fruit of exhausted soil, where mirrors and waters return the same illusion as reality, science goes underground, and the nuclear and the mystic equally replace human vice with non-human systems — ending with the recognition that all power is held on strings of geometry and guilt.

The poem systematically strips away every source of optimism — biological, scientific, military, revolutionary — leaving only the instruction to point ourselves back to where the myth began.

Claude

The title is a negation that the poem refuses to soften — there is no biological promise, no generational hope, no harvest coming. What replaces it is a world where 'mirrors and waters' return 'the same illusion as reality,' where knowledge is 'involved with the first and last months rent,' and where the nuclear and the mystic are 'equally garlanded by the replacement / of non human ones.' The poem's devastating precision is in lines like 'The new ice age simply means federally funded trays / For the liquor we'll need' — apocalypse administered through bureaucracy.

The two-page arc moves from cosmic doom to institutional critique and back again, refusing to let the reader settle into either register. The closing image of power held 'on strings' of 'geometry and guilt' — with glass as the medium of seeing — ties directly to the collection's title: every mirror is a puppet mechanism, and we are what it moves.