Page 329
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The final Tough strips back toward plain statement, treating knives, rifles, machine guns, hawk nose, and long looking as the route past success to an ending.
This version feels more declarative than the others, as if repetition has hardened uncertainty into a rough credo. The sequence from threat to picking up and going to find something makes violence sound like a search as much as a reaction. "Beyond success" is the key phrase, because the poem is no longer concerned with achievement at all, only with what remains when that language is exhausted.
The fourth and final 'Tough' strips the sequence back to plain, hardened declaration. The disavowals stand bare ('I was never living hell / I thought I was quiet / I was not a warror'), the weapons are listed without elaboration ('Knives, that is one thing / Rifel's another / Machine guns, gee / Who would now'), and threat reduces to action: 'what you pick up / What you go to find.' The instinctive image returns as 'Hawk nose, forget ypur skin,' and the credo closes the run: 'It means somethings / Beyond success / Don't you know / It means / the end of shit.' Source spellings 'warror,' 'Rifel's,' 'Who would now,' 'Hawk nose,' 'ypur,' and 'somethings' are preserved.