Untitled ("Money ain't a religion man")

By Jack Joseph Smith

Money ain't a religion man We like to be as social as we can The electric fence, or the roll of the wise Quit the two ways toward death All hands nay Intellectualy scattered like the negro can not Brief and singular with each misgiving For talking about the weather, and Louis L'Amour We not casting away the rot In the beginning is everymans sin Every earthly hurt, by all implication O, not to be inundated by the dark Carried across, there is no sound, we do not catch With a ring around a cross watch not the first idiot, want to put a square in a hole

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

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.

Claude

The opening declaration — money is not religion — immediately establishes what the poem will spend its lines disproving. The electric fence, the two ways toward death, the desire to be social: all suggest a world where economic and spiritual categories have already collapsed into each other, and the speaker knows it even as he denies it.

The vernacular 'man' in the title makes this a direct address — a piece of street wisdom offered to someone specific, which gives the philosophical content the urgency of conversation rather than the distance of argument.