Page 34
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A handwritten outburst and lost dial open a half-broken prayer from a misplaced radio, leading through sea, highway, Methodist fatherhood, shattered return, and Satan in the Sun.
The page feels like a station caught between signal and static, which suits its spiritual uncertainty. The handwritten 'I turned / lost the dial' makes the radio image feel literal and compositional at once, as if the poem begins in a failed tuning. The father's warning that "twice is when / you don't come back" gives the speaker a family proverb about risk, while glass on the Moor and Satan in the Sun make the whole landscape feel contaminated.
'Oh shit,' the handwritten 'I turned / lost the dial' begins this as a failed tuning, a half-broken prayer pulled from 'a song on the misplaced radio': 'Lord can you hear me, when I fall ... when I crawl ... at all.' A woman 'sander down to the sea' and strays 'across the highway,' while the speaker's 'father is a Methodist, / under the earth' who taught that 'twice is when / you don't come back.' The world ends contaminated - 'alot / of glass on the Moor' and 'Satan / more than once in the Sun.'