Page 65

By Jack Joseph Smith

Young Man And The Sea They are not livid, they are buldging from the eyes They are ravid, Blood is coming out of what ofered to the sea and sun is left of their skin Tingues suncken, bobbing away from their cracked conoes in my mind I'm drinking rum and smoking cocane, and I own the boat Muriel boat lift They came aboard: I lost my boat told I'd get there, would be a better way of putting it, I suppose the first time I went to heaven, Maybe that is why any kind of didtruction dosen't Bother me I mean once you have taken the chance, and just after the emotion received the blessing What is to MAKE you, stop that danger from trying

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The second sea piece deepens the same marine nightmare, linking bodily ruin, boat possession, a trip toward heaven, and the uneasy belief that danger can no longer bother the speaker.

This page revises the previous sea vision into a more explicit account of possession, loss, and blessing. The handwritten additions make the heaven claim feel qualified and self-correcting, as if the speaker is trying to explain how danger became survivable without fully believing the explanation.

Claude

This second sea piece reworks the same disaster more flatly -- bodies 'buldging from the eyes', 'ravid', their blood 'coming out of what ofered', 'Tingues suncken' beside 'cracked conoes in my mind'. The boatlift recurs ('Muriel boat lift', 'They came aboard: / I lost my boat'), but the poem's real turn is theological: 'the first time I went to heaven', so that 'any kind of didtruction dosen't Bother me' now that the speaker has 'taken the chance' and 'received the blessing'. It ends in a dare -- 'What is to MAKE you, / stop that danger from trying' -- treating survival as a license for recklessness.