By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Hard" makes drunken repetition, failed recovery, and accidental survival part of one bleak philosophy in which possession means only hanging on.
The page is unsparing about labor and desire: if work lacks adventure it loses meaning, yet the old possibility of getting something back has already narrowed. What matters is not success but the thought of return, which still alters the shape of a life even when impossible. Its last line strips away achievement entirely and leaves existence to chance.
'Hard' fuses drink, failed recovery, and chance into one bleak ethic: 'Drunk is hard / Day after day,' and 'If work is not an adventure / then it is no work at all.' The speaker once thought 'I could get back' but knows the impossibility no longer cancels the thought - 'it is / just the thought that makes / life different.' Its close strips away achievement entirely: 'You do not aquire anything / You hang on to what you got.. / because it is all accident.'