By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page imagines being lost in the ocean, then turns toward a hard lesson about holding onto meaning, life, and language at the same time they wound and test you.
Even in fragmentary form, its movement is clear: sea, river, curse, and language all belong to a single struggle to keep something alive without being destroyed by it. The closing turn toward logic, life, and language gives the page the feel of a rough philosophical note pulled straight from ordeal.
A short, snagged coda: 'Lost in the ocean / Better a sea return princess,' weighed against 'Better a river.' The discovery is paradoxical - the curse is both 'how to leave / And hold onto it at the same time' - and it 'jerks you' so that you 'stay / under so long' you have to fight up 'cold.' The last lines turn the whole drowning into a pursuit of speech: 'Logic dreams of its Life, is / Language, I sought.' This reading remains provisional because the page is handwritten and the quality band is 'mixed.'