Page 69

By Jack Joseph Smith

And wisdom walks way away today wondered Sacrifice There stars seek light Here a sun seeks shadow A ground swell is human it is nature inch by inch When there is no place to set the table Lost is simply a dish on the street, even better a pan in the wood Watching through black lips, wings knached and singled through seaver Left flapping the subterranean, with the whore having one way to walk, while her user has two It-is-only-that when glory ceases to exist, getting up in the morning, is done on purpose. The monster went with the process to appear Canter across the green facing fences risen I took a black cloth and wrong out the swett The water was the same, no clolor, maybe some yellow, the cloth stayed. A sign on the rack I thought it might help me between my teeth as I get wriped, will work good with worry Them I realized that if all matter dosent bleed; sacrifice is nothing to tell them.

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Light, shadow, street refuse, exploitation, cloth, sweat, and obliteration gather into a sacrificial vision where wisdom, matter, and bleeding become unstable.

The page treats sacrifice as both cosmic and bodily: stars, sun, nature, street refuse, sex, water, cloth, teeth, and blood all enter the same pressure field. The retained handwritten overlays make the page feel like an argument being revised while it happens.

Claude

After a handwritten preface ('And wisdom walks way away / today / wondered'), the poem balances cosmic and bodily sacrifice: 'There stars seek light / Here a sun seeks shadow', 'A ground swell is human / it is nature inch by inch'. Street images of exploitation -- 'Lost is simply a dish on the street', 'the whore having one way to walk, / while her user has two' -- give way to ritual labor with cloth and 'swett', and the page closes on a hard conditional: 'if all matter dosent / bleed; sacrifice is nothing to tell them'. This reading remains provisional because the page transcript is OCR-uncertain and extensive handwritten overlays (around glory ceases, 'done on purpose', and the final line) are unresolved.