Page 50

By Jack Joseph Smith

Leaving If ever you must go When the strain has that tug Then A split in the heart To be killed and killing on your way Like lousy language crumbling with all that you believe A thumb to the eye adjusting to the romantic Simple as a bus ticket and complicated as a bus station Or to be evidently and catch a ride and get aquainted And of course it is not sucide and someone else's grief That let's the truth into, right now you have not come back

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Departure is torn between pain, violence, bus-ticket practicality, and the refusal to let leaving be mistaken for suicide.

The page frames leaving as both wound and practical transit: split heart, killing, bus ticket, bus station, and grief all press against the insistence that departure is not suicide but a hard form of survival.

Claude

Leaving is figured as a wound that is also ordinary transit: 'A split in the heart', 'To be killed and killing on your way', yet 'Simple as a bus ticket and complicated as a bus station'. The poem's nerve is its denial -- 'of course it is not sucide and someone else's grief' -- and its last line, 'right now you have not come back', leaves the departure suspended, neither return nor death but a survival held open.