Untitled ("So men on purpose, untaxed sequence is injury consquence made")

By Jack Joseph Smith

So men on purpose, untaxed sequence is injury consquence made Never about faced or phoney about the thieft of any life done Today a soul as sheaves cut out of paper or blade Has a lone blue eye to take your temporal tongue Off history now temper is metaphor for blood Let us use the image of Cornel Klaus Von Strauffenberg Presently from Pittsburgh this message is entered cold Concerning the certitude of evil as a herd Settling scores mainstreet from the way of the wind on the farm Switching struggle to teasing timed terror, trapped bow to taut A jest of self gone to turn clear the kill in right from wrong Losing before your war to push dignity into external disbelief Chemical did not develope for biological tyranny to explain, possession as deliverance in the mind as natural; and for the death of avarice we in the basket will yearn, first person seconds in the Oregon State Penitentiary

Original Scan

Page 30

AI Interpretation

GPT

A late reframing of the book's opening violence, turning earlier imagery into a more declarative moral argument about evil, punishment, and inheritance.

Claude

The poem rewrites the collection's opening — the same images of taxed injury, stolen life, souls as sheaves — but now in a more declarative register, as if the speaker had spent the intervening poems working up the clarity to say it plainly. The blue eye and the temporal tongue return, but this time they belong to a statement rather than a tangle.

This late return to the book's opening vocabulary creates a structural echo that transforms the collection into a loop rather than a line. The violence named at the start is named again at the end, unchanged by everything between.