Untitled ("Avarice as an agreement with death")

By Jack Joseph Smith

A basket gott'en used to A childhood throughly understood A Penitentiary you have nothing to do with Silent as plexiglas a steer's gaping life Bonded systems, holy gossip, and branded greaves Up comes the shanty door shot gun The stone from the porch the ladies will set, dosen't seem to keep the hinges Oneece It's hitting a deer jumping on the highway Solvent is a bend in the river; a place lower than worship, where ridged is not spoken, and neither is bastard or bitch It is not an allerory when you are used to it By and large we are finished with truck stops, and Western Union as well, back to the banks Huntington, West Virginia, iron and coal, 1999, gives heat and tools

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem of poverty, labor, and rural violence that treats greed less as finance than as a damaged condition of place and memory.

Claude

The title line works as a thesis: greed is not accumulation but a pact with mortality, a way of agreeing to die slowly through possession. The poem then unfolds through images of containment — baskets, childhood understood too thoroughly, a penitentiary — as if each form of knowledge were another enclosure.

The progression from basket to childhood to penitentiary maps an arc of increasing confinement, suggesting that understanding itself can become a prison when it forecloses possibility.