By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The final Tough strips back toward plain statement, treating knives, rifles, machine guns, hawk noise, 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.
'Tough' mark four: finalizes the sequence — knives, rifles, machine guns, threatened, pick up, go to find, hawk nose, forget your skin, long looking; 'it means something / beyond success; don't you know / it means / the end of shit.'