Untitled ("Money ain't a religion man")
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This piece sounds like a social code spoken from the edge of collapse, where class talk, race talk, and religious language all rub against one another.
The poem opens as barroom theology - 'Money ain't a religion man / We like to be as social as we can' - and then keeps proving how thoroughly money and faith have fused, routing its argument through 'The electric fence', 'the two ways toward death', and a slide into 'everymans sin'. It reaches for first principles - 'In the beginning is everymans sin / Every earthly hurt, by all implication' - and ends on a refusal of forced fit: not wanting 'to put a square in a hole'.
What the title denies, the body cannot stop confessing; the speaker insists money is not religion while organizing the poem like a small catechism of sin, hurt, the dark, and a cross. The most charged and difficult line, 'Intellectualy scattered like the negro can not', recurs across this collection (it returns nearly verbatim in 'Nothing to fight for is what we do') and registers race as a limit on movement that the poem's 'we' both invokes and leaves unresolved; the reading flags this as charged source material preserved as written, not endorsed. The closing image, 'With a ring around a cross watch / not the first idiot, / want to put a square in a hole', binds commerce (a watch), faith (a cross), and the folly of forcing the wrong shape, so the poem's last gesture is against false reconciliation - some squares do not go in some holes, including the title's own denial. Source spellings ('Intellectualy', 'everymans') are kept verbatim.