By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Five pennies become a nickel in a child's pants, and that tiny exchange opens a meditation on mind, possession, and the repeated human power to add or subtract.
The childhood bank exchange turns value into something bodily and slightly comic, sitting in the pants before it turns into stash. From there the poem shifts to an old claim about good and evil, but locates the real act in the mind that counts, hoards, gives, and takes away. Full pockets make morality feel repetitive and transactional rather than grand.
'Choise': child takes five pennies to the bank and gets a nickel in pants. Good and evil exist within man's nature but it is the mind that makes it so. Pockets full enough to stash and start again — 'until I give or take away.'