The Wonderful Door

By Jack Joseph Smith

Don't let solid objects be vague when they move Unless planned is the part of the nenrpolitical dove Releasing your challenge to unwind a joker's scene On a non-profit stage having only gossip to gain: Where with but assorted fruite fiets make dirt Yet if you want a picture of life that is still You can be sure that you have made an eneny When postmortem you have seen the opposition objectively Oxygen is thought: Concentrate om:fire as violence being carried out fast+ While contrary’ to thase who make a view Drewing lots on the present or the past+ The fighting mind's future draws madness aside for use Instructing instinct to sway Like chariehed curtains of considerable size Already you have sunken men's eyes into blind throats Behind Holiday Inn oranges doing lip service Power-is a crowd om you with a wall of shove Them quick with the thinest seeking of feared innovation: The ever so lovely experience of a sleek hand Acknowledges all the burgundy in a birthright At business like a Thanksgiving wish through a nese bone
Still you haven't decided on any concept to finish it As carpet saleamen don't deal in concrete during a final punch . While through all your times your line has never downed a slut Though you have made a menu mostly of crime for lunch The realized wench your in cen't blink When recognized are monsters intense like door dark childhood Just above your knees atiffened past lust Voices have already shouted allright.with oakwood When phantoms put the pieces of the madhouse Into flashes of censcience that don't think Attrition in ites appearance as pitfall Sees a savior for the soul as obsolete When your getting up remember the old man saying, "I am not going to buy a convertable until we spend all our time in the country." Suddenly the whole works is grabbing money, while they laugh the truth inte a sickness. Surely there is no difference Between nightmare's of the brain For except that you crave digging With it instead of for it Gold and gold plated are the same
che Now with the understanding of finger prongs, that don't make music; you have forgotten about the sirens, and the cells that continue Meanwhile those tavern curtains are twe inches by twelve feet Thick and long enough to wipe up the blood of menimade women And hurling themselves like bad spit you can hear them Giving you no patience about the third end ofthe knot:. For you have arrived at a place where nothing is even, and the law won't bother to ask for a licence Lights flicker:on a fence Because darkness delights in your danger passing You are the slow bird that eats evil through ite senses Andyea no amile can digest the soft mess you've madése,

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A dense, surrealist address to a figure navigating thresholds of power, crime, madness, and sexual danger, where doors, curtains, and fences mark the boundaries between consciousness and nightmare, and where gold — real or plated — makes no difference.

The poem sustains its energy across three pages by never resolving its central tension: entry into the 'wonderful door' is simultaneously an act of courage and self-destruction, and the speaker cannot distinguish between the two.

Claude

The 'wonderful door' is wonderful only because it opens in both directions — toward revelation and toward ruin. The poem's second-person address traps its subject in a series of thresholds: Holiday Inn oranges doing lip service, carpet salesmen who don't deal in concrete, monsters intense like 'door dark childhood.' The key insight arrives midway — 'Gold and gold plated are the same' — which collapses the distinction between authentic and counterfeit experience, making every entry through the door equally real and equally fraudulent.

The three-page structure mirrors the door's logic: you keep passing through but never arrive. The tavern curtains 'two inches by twelve feet, thick and long enough to wipe up the blood of man-made women' are the poem's most visceral image — domestic fabric repurposed as evidence of violence. The closing image of the 'slow bird that eats evil through its senses' suggests that survival requires not speed but patience, not escape but digestion.