By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Tough begins by denying hell, quietness, and warriorhood, then measures knives and rifles against time until violence becomes a threshold that exceeds ordinary scale.
The speaker insists he was never living hell, which sounds less innocent than defensive. A knife means something because it can be held close in time, while the rifle points beyond the hand into a different kind of force. The poem does not glorify weapons, but it does treat them as symbols of a boundary the speaker cannot ignore.
The first of four pages all titled 'Tough,' opening the sequence with a guarded self-portrait: 'O to be absolute / I was never living hell / I thought I was quiet / I was not a warror,' set against others who 'do not know, / what it speaks to.' The poem then weighs weapons as meaning: 'A knife means something / No matter how big you see it, / very small in time; a rifel, / facing that sort of transcends / things.' Violence is treated as a threshold of significance rather than spectacle. Source spellings 'warror' and 'rifel' are preserved.