Page 22

By Jack Joseph Smith

NO BIOLOGICAL PROMISE We are the last fruit out of the last lime in the soil While with the toil that will not remember the plow We are due to be ushered out of the Earth's last framework As the alert new wizards discover no alarm In a particular swift magic prohibiting The slightest bow in space Instant justification comments On mirrors and waters responding The same illusion as: reality Hell as a planet leads in commerce While multitudes locate knowledge Involved with the first and last months rent And on the streams we took There is a horrible rippling Between rocks that skip And kids talking facts The new ice age simply means federally funded trays For the liquor we'll need Yet we accept a governed abstraction When eyeglassed statues put around us a sense of well being That suggests all things can be measured with a bottom line (There is a game here that appears to have a chart, that may be witnessed only without reflection.)

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem pictures a worn-out civilization that disguises exhaustion and control with commerce, abstraction, and fake reassurance.

Compared with the earlier version, ushered out gives the ending of humanity an even more managed and ceremonial tone. The poem keeps colliding cosmic language with rent, liquor, and eyeglassed statues, which makes power feel both grandiose and petty. The closing suspicion about charts and reflection suggests that the governing logic of the world depends on a practiced blindness.

Claude

A second, lightly revised draft of 'NO BIOLOGICAL PROMISE' (cf. page 12): here we are 'due to be ushered out of the Earth's last framework' rather than welcomed, the 'eyeglassed statues' still impose a 'sense of well being', and the chart 'may be witnessed only without reflection.'

The doubling is itself part of the manuscript's texture: the same long apocalyptic piece retyped, with both versions left in the sequence as evidence of the poet pressure-testing rather than finalizing. The telling variant is 'ushered out' for 'welcomed out' - a colder, more procedural verb that sharpens the poem's sense of an end stage-managed by bureaucracy, matching its other administrative images ('months rent', 'federally funded trays'). The line 'Hell as a planet leads in commerce' survives intact, still converting damnation into market dominance, and the closing parenthetical's refusal of 'reflection' names the practiced blindness the whole poem indicts. The retained forms 'last lime' and 'months rent' are kept as the scan shows them.