Page 78
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem swings between social pressure, erotic possession, and a longing to explain origins that words cannot fully reach.
The opening turns every option into trouble, making even spectatorship feel punishing. From there the voice moves into direct desire, wanting sheets, touch, and restlessness, but that intimacy keeps opening onto mountains, seas, and darkness instead of stable union. The result is urgent and unstable, with love pressed against abstraction, sleep, and impossibility.
'Impossibility': 'Watch the game, don't watch the game, get into the game' - all of which bring 'trouble', while not doing any sends 'abstracts' 'to serve you hell' - then a love address: 'Slender beauty now I will not rest / Till your sheets are mine', wanting to explain 'The beginning of the mountains and the seas'.
The first movement is a no-win triad: watch, refuse to watch, or join, and every option lands the speaker 'in some trouble', while opting out leaves abstraction to 'serve you hell'. The poem makes even spectatorship a punishable stance. The pivot to desire is just as restless - 'I love you / Like wind', 'All time and big down deep beneath' - and admits its own limit, wanting to explain the origin of mountains and seas but having only 'let the sleep of darkness / be your touch'. 'Slender beauty now I will not rest' is the most honest line, treating desire as a task to be completed rather than a state to inhabit, which is where the title's impossibility bites. Source spellings 'dosen't' and 'diseration' are preserved as written.