Page 54

By Jack Joseph Smith

Beyond hope, a skunk is under the step down rafters You start a wif and say it can't be you get it and say who cares This is after all something that will go away I can go anywhere along the fence I know that I am self serving when I see how far I could go down At the end of the day I have no money Tally it up I guess I get fifty bucks Each time he makes a kill

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page links rot, money, hunting, and self-interest in a blunt account of surviving a mean economy.

The skunk under the rafters and the fifty bucks at the end keep the poem grounded in small-scale material life. It reads like a speaker measuring exactly how much degradation can be absorbed before it simply becomes routine.

Claude

`Beyond hope, a skunk is under / the step down rafters`. Then a bookkeeping admission — `I guess I get fifty bucks / Each time he makes a kill`. The economics of rural partnership turned into verse.