Page 85
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"One More Time" moves through wonder, danger, innocence, and temptation, with handwritten marginal questions pressing the typed poem toward moonlit violence, ghosts, and waste.
The recurring pressure point is children: their lack of sin is set beside the urge to arm them, which makes the page morally alarmed even when its language drifts into dreamlike abstraction. The handwritten additions make the page feel like an argument with itself, asking what can be done and circling images of the moonlit, the holy ghost, and waste.
One More Time pairs a fragmented war image, a knife in the sky, with a meditation on innocence and inattention, then breaks into disjointed capitalized fragments - THE MOONLIT, the holy ghost, NOW LIE - that read as a collapse from narrative into raw exclamation.