Page 36

By Jack Joseph Smith

Poverty Program Intrusion It was on Pittsburgh's lower Fifth Avenue where I was preaching the word after work Which at that time was William Saroyan No; it wasn't Fifth Avenue It was Forbes Street which is one street up South The tavern where I'd gone was down from the tunnel that leads toward the Southside That's how I know now through that huge round stone It was a bad bar with too much mirror and no white light Piss over glassy fine dirt Like the coal one can breathe Finished to a flush from footwork beneath a strung out brick alley lady- Like thin resin over a floor of ants For high-heeled, low-soled lonely danced jukebox shoes To be devil enticed down through the faded up gleam of a Face peering from the below of 1930 squared black tile She was in nasty garment shape of torn pale green shades With a gray spider shawl tied to her loose-pinned bun of hair Drunk with loss beneath forgiveness of a kind the heavens would pile up on a doomsday- While I was young and foolish with fancy notions from my own emotional problem with perception. (no mirror now) We had started at one of the back bench hard booth brown black on black tables (the thick of the fiftiesh type plastic excapes me) But from there along the wall I now remember us seated at the bar once... round old cracked red leather able to spin stool high big tops "In the time of your life," I read, "in that time of your life you must kill, then kill, and don't feel bad about it."

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A remembered Pittsburgh bar scene turns literary ambition into something grimy, theatrical, and helpless beside another person's visible ruin.

The speaker carefully corrects the street name and maps the tunnel, mirrors, dirt, tile, jukebox shoes, and torn clothing, as if exact memory might justify what happened there. Reading William Saroyan in that room feels half earnest and half absurd, especially against the woman's drunkenness and the bar's stale, mirrored ugliness. The quoted line about killing lands like a dangerous collision between art, youth, and misery.

Claude

Opening 'Poverty Program Intrusion': in a Pittsburgh tavern off Forbes Street, the young speaker is 'preaching the word' of William Saroyan to a 'strung out brick alley lady' in 'torn pale green shades / With a gray spider shawl', and ends quoting Saroyan: 'In the time of your life... / you must kill, then kill, / and don't feel bad about it.'

The page is built on compulsive geographic correction - it is not Fifth Avenue but Forbes Street, 'one street up South' - as if pinning the exact tunnel, tile, and 'huge round stone' could justify what happened in the room. The setting is rendered with merciless physical specificity ('1930 squared black tile', jukebox shoes, 'thin resin over a floor of ants'), and the woman is held in that same hard detail, 'Drunk with loss beneath forgiveness of a kind'. The framing of a youth 'young and foolish with fancy notions' evangelizing fiction into a skid-row bar is both tribute and self-indictment, and the Saroyan quotation about killing lands as a dangerous collision of literature, youth, and real misery. The refusal to flatten the woman is what keeps the portrait short of condescension. Source spelling 'excapes', the lady- and doomsday- hyphens, and the ellipsis after 'once' are kept as written.