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

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 book's closing work openly rewrites its title poem, replaying 'injury consquence made', 'a soul as sheaves cut out of paper or blade', the 'lone blue eye' that takes 'your temporal tongue', and 'Cornel Klaus Von Strauffenberg' - but now relocated 'Presently from Pittsburgh' rather than the earlier 'unsettled home'. It restates the creed 'possession as deliverance in the mind as natural' and lands on a new, concrete ending the opening lacked: 'for the death of avarice we in the basket will yearn, / first person seconds in the Oregon State Penitentiary'.

Read against 'Hillbilly Hitler', this poem is a recapitulation that finally names the speaking position: the same von Stauffenberg, the same souls-as-sheaves and blue eye, but anchored to Pittsburgh and then to 'the Oregon State Penitentiary', so the abstract overture resolves into a located, first-person voice. The phrase 'first person seconds' is the hinge - it claims the lyric 'I' while measuring it in prison time, 'seconds' as both moments and a runner-up, the self caught counting. The closing 'for the death of avarice we in the basket will yearn' loops back to the second poem of the book ('A basket gott'en used to', 'avarice as an agreement with death'), so the collection closes its own circuit: the penitentiary and the basket of habituated greed name the same confinement. The reading treats the dense restated lines and preserved misspellings ('consquence', 'thieft', 'Strauffenberg', 'develope', 'mainstreet') as deliberate source recurrence, not error.