Page 64
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Sea-battered bodies, rum, cocaine, and neighboorhood bravado make maritime vision feel both hallucinatory and self-destructive, framed by a handwritten call to do what is not the same.
The page binds sea disaster to intoxication and private ownership: battered bodies enter the speaker's boat, and the loss of the boat becomes a strange opening. The handwritten my before Blood intensifies the bodily identification, while the ending turns anger and looking up into a chance for heaven.
The Hemingway title is dragged into the Mariel boatlift: bodies are 'buldging from their eyes', 'their skin is blistered', and 'my Blood is coing out of the last of flesh offered / to the sea and sun'. The speaker narrates self-destruction from the inside -- 'drinking rum im the neighboorhood', 'doing cocane as fact as I cam' -- and ties dispossession to the migration, 'it is the Muriel boat lift', 'They came aboard,, / and I lost my boat'. Anger turns upward into the stacked handwritten benediction 'I'D HAVE A CHANCE / for / HEAVEN / NOW'. This reading remains provisional because the page is a partial model transcription with large unresolved handwritten additions.