Untitled ("We never, even ever thought about the")

By Jack Joseph Smith

We never, even ever thought about the value, the money of us. I went down relative to a realitive with an on line. I took leager of our stuff, numbers, inprints, burned in dates, and lo and behold our shaek's insides is worth a quarter of a million dollars And now that the bank is taking foreeloaser. I find out that it ain't five acres, it's one hundree and fifty of them Woo I walk across twwn a hundred times, I fell sorry for military waves in New York Imagine dealing with your small town bank about where you mingt be at about five acres, and your nephew goes on line and finds out that you got One handerd and fifty

Original Scan

Page 43

AI Interpretation

GPT

A furious poverty-and-property poem where family land, bad records, and bank logic turn into absurd revelation.


Claude

A furious poverty-and-property poem in which the speaker, who 'never, even ever thought about the / value, the money of us', has a nephew go 'on line' and discovers that the 'shaek's insides is worth a quarter of / a million dollars' and the land 'ain't five acres, it's one / hundree and fifty'. The revelation arrives as the bank is 'taking foreeloaser', so wealth and its loss surface in the same breath, punctuated by a flat 'Woo' and pity for 'military waves in / New York'.

The poem's outrage is aimed less at being poor than at learning poverty was always quantified by someone else - that an online search by a 'nephew' can reveal land and value the family 'never... thought about' while the bank, which did the counting, moves to seize it. The deadpan 'Woo' is devastating: a quarter-million dollars announced and shrugged off in a single syllable, because the number means nothing when 'the bank is taking foreeloaser'. The scale keeps doubling against the speaker - five acres becomes a hundred and fifty, ignorance becomes documented worth becomes documented loss - and the misspelled bureaucratic words ('foreeloaser', 'realitive', 'leager') keep the official machinery slightly out of focus, the way it stays out of reach. The odd flash of sympathy for 'military waves' in New York widens the grievance into a shared sense of being administered by distant systems that know your numbers better than you do.