The Call

By Jack Joseph Smith

There didn't seem to be any differance Between going and staying She though it would be so fine And after Africa she is sick He thought Priest would be good, "they will listen to everything I say" It was no matter what, and you can't love Jesus that way The administrator saw the money on it's possibilities Like sheet music with no one to play A dime crossed the earth and silence came back Call them out, and see if they call you If it is evil enough, by the sword, buy, buy the drugs better to be more evil than they

Original Scan

Page 4

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem about corrupted vocation, in which religion, money, violence, and public speech all collapse into one compromised system.

Claude

The poem stages a collapse of distinctions: going and staying, priesthood and power, Africa and sickness, all become versions of the same failed vocation. The man who thinks 'they will listen to everything I say' reveals the priesthood as ego rather than service — and the poem's flat tone suggests this is not a surprise but a diagnosis.

The shift between 'she' and 'he' in consecutive stanzas creates an echo effect: both figures pursue calling and both find it corrupted, as if the poem is arguing that no vocation survives contact with the world that produced it.