Page 93

By Jack Joseph Smith

YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE EXCUSES WHEN EXCUSE YOU WIN The wine is in my blood The sun sets through the glass at my thirst My forehead feels thin The wild famale dog has not stopped barking for minutes and minutes and minutes The writing room is hazed blue-light against the red tinted wooden walls An airplane has crused and orused from the distance Now it wings over the sounds here and there is only a hum I was thinking it can all go to hell untill the hummed stillness For the fasting is working and the wine has fumed The dogs were turned loose hungry after eating with me; and the writing has been silence and childhood meetings At first the airplane was the fabricated egel of clamor But when it swept I understood why introuption is many times the key that makes illusion clean

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A wine-room lyric moves through blood, sunset, barking, fasting, and an airplane's interruption of stillness.

The page treats interruption as part of perception: the barking dog, the airplane, wine, hunger, and the writing room all press into the speaker's attempt at silence. The final claim that interruption can make illusion clean gives the draft its clearest turn from bodily sensation into poetics.

Claude

A wine-soaked evening in the writing room turns a barking dog and a passing airplane into markers of altered perception, moving from intoxicated dread toward a fragile, humming calm.

The poem builds through sensory saturation - wine, thirst, blue haze, barking - until the airplane's drone displaces the noise and becomes a figure for clarity born from disruption, suggesting that intrusion, not comfort, is what strips illusion away.