A Sound

By Jack Joseph Smith

Take them away from the place I sleep Let the dimes to dollars go round the clock Like bad buttons let the shadows misgage the weak; prepare the thief with no why of doing things To be caught end in the street Hung by bras and shorts, a will be done There the crowd goes back, all, all alone, now keeping close in their sheets Was it tight enough, and why have things changed; or why haven't they changed enough But then again, probably his problem, was just unperceptive...

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A tense urban lyric where money, petty exposure, and crowd judgment compress into a jagged little drama.

Claude

The poem opens with an imperative to remove things from where the speaker sleeps — dimes, dollars, shadows — and then lets the street scene accumulate its own small drama of exposure and judgment. The 'sound' of the title may be the noise that wakes you or the noise the crowd makes as it watches.

The jagged line breaks mirror the poem's nervous energy. Nothing in this urban scene is settled; even the metaphors ('like bad buttons') resist neatness, offering comparison without clarity.