Page 64

By Jack Joseph Smith

Undignified ‘Night: (If I were-a hunter I would hunt) I am, and I didn't; daft to be left with my own skin Like a blade in the wind Be it grass or Inife I still my choices in cigarette smoke A copy you see gone from guts Knowing the etrange responsibility: of the sick at heart Now I need another taste Not of life, but of dream While memories are as clean as the scorch of hell Yet in my time__No3; quit__ Shame can not be asked to go on without the naked “beast.,

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem stages a degraded night of appetite, shame, and self-division, where dream is wanted more than life and the inner beast refuses dismissal.

Hunting, blades, cigarettes, and hellfire give the voice a hard, self-abrasive texture. Desire keeps turning away from ordinary living toward intoxication, dream, and repetition, as if the speaker can neither master nor cleanse what drives him. Shame remains present, but it has no power to banish the raw animal core named at the end.

Claude

'Undignified Night': the speaker is not a hunter, is left with his own skin, stills choices in cigarette smoke.

The poem is an honest posture-report — the speaker lists what he is not in order to name what he is. 'Memories as clean as the scorch of hell' is the figure that refuses the comfort of guilt. The closing — that shame can't be asked to leave without the naked beast — is the page's moral argument: you don't get to keep shame without keeping what shamed you.