By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page sounds like a cosmological manifesto, linking body parts, punctuation, and the universe into a theory of how expression begins.
Its repeated 'As soon As' gives it the feel of a ritual or theorem. The poem treats grammar and existence as the same event, as though the line, comma, and semecolin emerge from bodily crisis and cosmic order at once.
A handwritten incantation built from repeated 'As soon As' clauses that move up the infant body - diapers, feet, stomach, forehead - until 'the Life comes / to task, And the world / is verbie.' At that point grammar becomes cosmology: 'there is a line, / A coma, A semecolin, Express- / ion At the jowcture of / the Universe, the best / place to start.' The all-caps coda 'IT MAKES A SOUND' insists that this punctuation at the seam of existence is audible, not silent. Source spellings 'verbie,' 'semecolin,' and 'jowcture' are preserved as written.