Page 55

By Jack Joseph Smith

The cloth of the gossip priest will be spilled with wine While his Handmaidenlaymen pass silver dishes of deception UNDER THE NOSES OF THOSE KEPT POSSESSED And he who accepts gold plated pleasure rings from greased palmed Kings Will be fortunate just before the word final indeed To remain with the remains of his bottom balled jewels TEMPTATION Nothing will have us! Structural splendor - Dedication to the passive charm of reasonable newness - Artistically manufactured money - Economic Oilcocktail energy growth; brought to us through the frown of a Walter Cronkite snicker - Or the completely unlonely athlete - (whatever desires to stop primitive developement) The ruins and the ancient battle continue To CREASE with power standing against the fatness Till our time toils the artifical heart to a stop As we say smiling, while stroking the dinge of our bones at least fastly thin No devouring menace Can take hold of long practicing dancers

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Religious hypocrisy, money, media, and manufactured desire are folded into one corrupt spectacle that keeps power alive while pretending to offer splendor.

The poem attacks a whole social order of priests, kings, dishes, rings, athletes, newsmen, and artificial charm, all linked by deception and appetite. Capital and piety are not opposites here; they work together as performance, coating greed in ceremony and modern polish. Even the body is dragged into that machinery through bones, fatness, and the artificial heart, though the ending gives dancers a hard-won resilience against total capture.

Claude

Double-barreled lyric: 'gossip priest' whose cloth gets spilled with wine, then a 'Temptation' section indicting Walter Cronkite snickers and oilcocktail growth.

The poem runs its religious critique straight into its economic one — the gossip priest and the television anchor are the same figure in different vestments. 'Long practicing dancers' as the survivors is the page's wink: the people who keep moving can't be taken by any menace, devouring or otherwise. The stitched structure of the two halves is itself the argument.